Listening to Transparency
Venue
Artist
Pierre-Alain Jaffrennou, Michel François, Christian Rizzo, Dania Reymond, Deng Yuejun, Denys Vinzant, Wang Fujui, Gregory Chatonsky, Henri-Charles Caget, Iuan-Hau Chiang, Jean-François Estager, Julie Vacher, Li Yuhang, Luc Ferrari, Manon de Boer, Matt Coco, Pierre-Laurent Cassière, Pascal Frament, Stéphane Borrel, Thierry de Mey, Thomas Léon, William Anastasi, Xiao Yu, Yann Orlarey, Dominique Blais
Curator
Organizer
Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, China Minsheng Bank, GRAME (National Center for Musical Creation/Lyon)
Co-organizer
Consulate General of the Republic of France in Shanghai, Shanghai Minsheng Art Foundation, Beijing Minsheng Foundation for Arts and Culture, Beijing Minsheng Art Museum
Support
Shanghai Cultural Development Foundation, Ministry of Culture (France), City of Lyon, French Institute of Lyon, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region, Wallonie-Bruxelles International, Artecture Company, Vision Prosper
Sponsor
Lanci Industry
Listening to Transparency
Listening to transparency is designed both as a path and as a scenography gathering more than forty art installations struck by luminous waves and sonorous vibrations. Listening to Transparency proceeds as a mere mega musical instrument, in which “the sound”, in sides with the visual aspects, stands as the backbone. All of the pieces presented execute a monumental musical score, alternating sounds, silences, and nearly-nothing-to-hear elements, as a “musical suite” marrying and magnifying the architectural fluidity of Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum.
The indiscernible slope linking the four levels of the museum epitomizes the passage from one state to the other: the continuous ascent is in line with topic of transparency which is manifested filterings of real world around us. These filters induce a particularly rich world of ties, variations and metamorphosis between the territories of sound and visual arts.
The use of glass and other kinds of materials–translucent, luminous and liquid devices produced unprecedented sensory combinations, generalizing, throughout the arts of the 20th century, a state of transparency. The image fixed upon the glass plate, then on the film reel, has freed imagination by developing a poetic of the treated plate, and has multiplied all sorts of process such as photogrammetry and rayography… If the optical qualities are more likely to generate these interpenetrations, transparency is also today at the heart of the vibrant world of communications and networks to the proliferation of virtual spaces.
The sound, which is purely vibratory and translucent space, appeals as the golden thread of the exhibition, to the transparency of the very listening, in which the sound reveals itself by the silence. Between tangibility and virtuality, immersive, silent or synaesthesial artworks hence stand alongside with the configurations in which the visual and sound develop according dissonant or autonomous trajectories. Other pieces, immobile and silent, appeal directly to the visitor’s sonorous imagination.
Inside those digital fluctuations, making the tangible reappear through its most varied hybridations and introducing sensitivity into virtuality are, together, away to recover balance in an increasingly evanescent environment. It is also contributing to, now, embody our vision of the world into the infosphere, i.e in an invisible and complex field of waves and interconnections: more and more "physically" transparent, less and less controllable.
Most of the pieces that succeed each other, keep alternating between light and darkness, immediacy and slow moments, sound wave and encounters with imperceptibility. They confront virtual fields, ecosystems, tangible realities and luminous resonances; they thread a path of potentials as well as a non-predictive itinerary, in constant variation, sprinkled with reflections and reminiscences, to silence … at the perception of ineffability. Listening to Transparency invites the visitor to transform himself into a “spotter of sounds”.
James Giroudon
James Giroudon was born in La Tour du Pin, Isère. He studied at the University of Lyon and is graduated from art history, sociology and education sciences. And he is a graduate of Pierre Schaeffer and Guy Reibel’s class at the National Superior Conservatory of Music in Paris. From 1982 to 1990, he taught at the Conservatory of Music in Saint-Etienne, where he created an electro-acoustic music section.
Christophe Lebreton
Sound Engineer, Computer Music Designer.
Musician and scientific training he joined the team GRAME—National Center for Musical Creation in 1989. He works for research and development of tools for creating, while confronted daily with the realities and diversity of contemporary productions: Great shows, international concerts, festivals Musiques en scène, sound installations, discographies...
Since 2003 he worked specifically on the motion capture and stage increased. He experiences what he calls “instrumental set design” and is interested in all arts where his research and developments are related.
