Acousmatic & light installation
10 PVC tubes, 10 HP, 10 fluorescent tubes

Aître Blanche is done in October 2008 at the Aître Saint Maclou* (Rouen, France). Nowadays, art school of the town, the Aître Saint Maclou has been a mass grave for the plague that happened in the 12th and 16th centuries. And boneyards are still laying under its floor.

Aître Blanche is a night installation consisting of 10 black PVC sculptures (tubes) 15cmx500cm high, each equipped with a loudspeaker and a fluorescent tube.
This work is about family secrets (structures), unspoken things, lies transmitted consciously or not through generations.

The 10 tubes represent polymorphic entities, male/female and trans-generational aspects of a family.
This topic came to me by chance. The idea at the beginning was to collect confidences (from my family and friends, but also from public areas, movies…).

Words, sentences, strong, simple but fundamental.
Those words, after a selection, got randomly displayed in a row or superimposed ; and that created (after what I would call a work of generational sieving) male/female groups on several generations. From those manipulations and layouts appeared, among others, a topic about child abuse.
The “acousmatic” composition, organisation as well as acoustic scenography became then related to this central topic.

* L’Aître (from the latin word “atrium”) Saint Maclou, former medieval cemetery

the video one follows is small documentary !

Sound installation
music & Light
Commission by Happy New Ears Festival
Kortrijk . Belgium

The first time I entered this tunnel intending to create 2 sound pieces, almost immediatly, Hieronymus Bosch’s
painting came to my mind, mostly with the second panel of his series « visions of after life », Ascent of the blessed.

At this very moment, a car passed by with extremely loud speakers and made the space resound with heroic Metal music.
The Metal music and its related social and cultural codes, partly rooted in religious worlds, have always been funny
to me (Judgement day, and so on).
Certain elements from NDE accounts (Near Death Experience) are perceptible in this tunnel :

• The passage from one space to another
• the light
• The shifting colours of the architecture
• The meetings
• The spiral

In this transcient space, I felt like working for the citizens who are used to walk through this tunnel
as they are significantly exposed to the same noise pollution that, alas, also exists in so many public places.

Music : erikm
Voice : Wendy van Wynsberghe & An Mertens

Views from the workshop of a series of samplings of concrete objects, which
I have collected over the past years from around the world. Beyond the surface, I seek a poetic
dialectic between the object and my approach to sound samplings.
The purely technical dimension of some objects, such as tin, piezo diode, will also be integrated into this exploration.

Pierre Henry’s concrete paintings have always left me doubtful, but nevertheless resonate with this work.
Additionally, I am also developing sound diffusion techniques for certain of these assemblages."

Titles
Top-Luberon - Ginko-Palace-Kyoto - Madera a la deriva-Caleta Yungay - Oeuf-de-Zebu
Collet-Adrar Ndern - Posidonie - Glaðheimar-Lichen - Chaine de L’etoile - Collet - Cevennes

Black plastic found object, Epoxyde, 150 cm

Ground water, polluted by plastic remnants from the sea, here comes back to life, out of their own faeces.
Sarcastic allusion to the oil tanker Amoco Cadiz – which sinking in 1978 caused one of the worst ecological disasters in history – the art piece replays the score of a catastrophe on an oil slick background.
Scraps from the oil silos strewn on the beaches are taken and sampled as a musical sculpture, in an industrial way. Taken in and regurgitated, filtered by life, each element brings back to the mechanic sounds of its origins.

Extract : 58.00 S.
original time : 07.50 m
Projected onto a specific screen
concept and music by eRikm
programming Stéphane Cousot

Accumulation and repetition of a complex variable image -
This features several states of subtractive synthesis of the image
source, which were then reorganized and composed.
The work on images involves the same processes that I have developed with sound. I use very short fragments of visual or sound material (video or photographs) that I explore digitally with a relationship of disincarnation, fragmentation and generational synthesis of one or several elements.

Blind Video • 2008
Concept : eRikm
Extract : 00.48mn
Original time : 32.32mn

Something roars. Is it the MGM Lion or St Jerome’s I see, translating the sound automatically, almost unthinkingly into image ? For I feel a need to see the sound, frame it in some way. The sound is in hiding, half-concealed, a beast in the jungle and this makes me nervous. Sound anticipates a danger or desire, it announces something to see, and yet at the same time exceeds what is eventually revealed to the eye. Voices lost in space, what have they seen. Or rather what have I heard in the voices, trapped in the asthmatic hiss of radio waves ? Somewhere over the rainbow. Which is to say, beyond the visible spectrum. The song overleaps what it can envisage. There’s a land that I dreamed of once in a lullaby. We are returned to sound as the materiality of loss, but one that cannot be localized. In space no one can hear you scream. In time no one will know the scream was yours. Blow out. Listening to ‘Lux Payllettes’ I imagine eRikm like a negative of Jack Terry in De Palma’s film, looking not for the ‘right’ sound, but to interrogate sound’s uneasy place in a battle of rights. What follows is a schizoid balade, a deftly orchestrated, sometimes hysterical melodrama of sounds on the run in search of an unfettered spatio-temporal continuum in the sun and a privileged view of the nothing new. Eternity, or just sea and sky and a skipping CD ?

time : 5.00mn
image and music by eRikm
Osaka-Kyoto trip

time : 2.45mn
image and music by eRikm
programming Stéphane Cousot

The work on images involves the same processes that I have developed with sound. I use very short fragments of visual or sound material (video or photographs) that I explore digitally with a relationship of disincarnation, fragmentation and generational synthesis of one or several elements.