Artists & Robots presents a flowing work by Jacopo Baboni Schilingi. Pierre Gervasoni · Le Monde · 19 June 2018.
Although the Grand Palais exhibition Artists & Robots mainly presents visual artists’ works, it does not neglect sound, specifically music, in making machine-assisted art. Pioneer Iannis Xenakis’s UPIC is naturally included, though somewhat like a museum piece owing its place only to its inventor’s fame. More significant is the space given to fifty-one-year-old Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda: an entire room for work at the intersection of monumental numerical video projections and highly refined electronic music.
For immersion in a genuine musical flow, however, one must reach the grand staircase. There, a Venezuelan Elias Crespin sculpture floats in constant transformation through invisible nylon threads linking metal rods to printer motors. The electronic sounds do not merely furnish the space, as too often at such events. They gently compel visitors to stop and listen. Powerful and refreshing as whale songs, these marvellous roars produce curious moving patches of light on a modest screen.
“It reflects my states of mind”
Images and sounds share one source: composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s breathing. This former Luciano Berio collaborator, whose path included IRCAM’s studios, has worn a device as discreet as it is productive for a year. An elastic band sewn with silver fibre measures breathing at his abdomen and transmits data to software managing pre-existing musical material.
The sound bank consists of concert or rehearsal recordings of earlier works, but the resulting composition testifies entirely to the composer’s present existence. “It reflects my states of mind at that moment,” says the musician, born in Milan in 1971 and now a French citizen. More than fingerprints or eye characteristics, breathing carries identity, he believes. “If you are stressed, you breathe upwards,” he explains.
An application associates red with inhalation and blue with exhalation. Using his mobile phone, he transmits every characteristic of respiration and bodily movement wherever he is in the world. When disconnected for a shower or other private activities, the software works from the previous twelve hours’ data.
The work’s title, Argo, evokes Ulysses’ faithful dog. It cannot be experienced in its entirety except through streaming on the composer’s website. Reflecting his passion for chance in art, it also demonstrates an attachment to the body first expressed through reconsidering the score. Since 2007 he has written music not on paper but directly on the skin of men and women accompanying him from morning to evening as he composes.
Artists & Robots, until 9 July, Grand Palais, Place Clemenceau, Paris 8th. Wednesday–Monday, 10 a.m.–8 p.m.; Wednesday until 10 p.m. Admission €10–14.