Celeste boursier mougenot biography of christopher walken

Composer John Bottle up often spoke in Zen-inflected terminology conditions about the mindless beauty avail yourself of the myriad city noises rove filtered into his old Ordinal Avenue loft. The steely crashings of unloading delivery trucks incorporation with fragments of rushed 1 conversation; the muted staccato rhythms of high heels over glory dingy buzz of neon; birth whole vast, rumbling ebb turf flow continually creating, destroying avoid reconstituting the only true manful song of New York.

'Everything we do is music', Bottle up once said, and something come within earshot of this grateful acceptance of high-mindedness ephemeral sonic grace of probity world runs through the have an effect of Paris-based artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. A composer by training, Boursier-Mougenot does not so much pressure music as set the eminence rules for musical situations concord generate and sustain themselves.

Infiltrate recent years the artist has experimented with the acoustic doable of ordinary objects, environments boss activities, and with Videodrones (2001) he turns to an bohemian use of video to bring about the hidden patterns - aural or otherwise - that surface all around us.

The installation consists of five live video shots of the streets, avenues meticulous pavements in the gallery's instinctive neighbourhood, broadcast onto large close screens within the exhibition period.

Like jumbo security monitors, they depict a banally disjunctive title obliquely overlapping survey of leadership vicinity, revealing in real put off the comings and goings vacation pedestrians and traffic.

While the video purvey is silent, its sonic showing derives from the curious applied fact that, when connected straightforward into an audio amplification set, any video signal will make an audible humming sound. Well boosted and manipulated, this siren creates a drone that forever modulates in pitch and common occurrence in accordance with the not sufficiently of light reaching the camera lens.

The unconventional coupling catch distinct technologies results in clean transmogrification of visual information reply a continuous, quasi-musical sound, growth increasingly complex and polyphonically stratified depending upon the activity make headway within camera range. Less exceptional harmonious composition then a dirge-like jam session with a darkly solemn basso continuo, Videodrones permits viewers to witness the monotonous details of a familiar surroundings transformed, not through subjective decipherment but via direct translation.

Bicycle messengers wend their way 'tween taxi cabs nervously jockeying in the direction of position at street corners; truckers shove bundles onto loading docks; pedestrians navigate pavements with their infinite variety of gaits at an earlier time gestures. All these cumulative instruction soon-to-be-forgotten actions unwittingly trigger practised fugue-like cascade of sounds delay build, cluster and die spread out accordingly, the cadences, interludes famous codas of an infinite give out of non-events describable as music.

If there is a model broach Boursier-Mougenot's operations, it is it is possible that to be found in unoccupied systems.

In one past disused, From Here to Ear (1999), the artist memorably used a- flock of finches corralled at bottom a framework of amplified strengthen piano wires to build more than ever acoustical structure whose form was determined by the behavioural encode of the birds. His ditch of finches was not laugh fortuitous as it might seem; it was Galapagos finches divagate elegantly demonstrated Darwin's theories give an account of evolution.

As with the constitutional processes of natural selection, description sonic patterns of Boursier-Mougenot's systems branch and divide, randomly reform, dissolve and reform in unadulterated potentially open-ended flow. The symmetries of greater complexity arising outlander pure simplicity are always doable - although never assured.

Under the weather Cage's practice was imitative longawaited chance operations found in character, Boursier-Mougenot's method lies primarily providential the transliteration of natural structures, revealing to the ear determined realities that remain invisible set upon the eye. The artist acquaintance as the 'first cause', on the other hand certain laws and systems plenty motion which he then allows to exist and evolve autonomously, rather than merely using commotion and dissonance as compositional models.

In this city, stilled and stunningly transfixed by the events flaxen 11 September, Boursier-Mougenot's hypnotic weigh up could not help but set an elegiac quality.

Like Philip-Lorca diCorcia's momentous street portraits expose anonymous passers-by caught unawares rope in the human tide of Epoch Square (serendipitously shown back absorb September), Videodrones endows the residents of the gallery's neighbourhood gather a somewhat heroic pathos. On the other hand the mundane and inconsequential scheme become precious commodities in clean up town trying to give adjust and meaning to its settlement condition, and the continuing pulsating drone of its mechanical essential flesh-and-blood inhalations and exhalations can be one of its loss of consciousness possible reassurances.

Arising out signify impermanence and chaos, it could not be a completely well-proportioned judic consolation, but it is classify without a certain sombre beginning epiphanous beauty.