2<\/a><\/sup>, by the way, that was not asked to participate in this project, since it is reserved strictly to artists who are still alive.<\/p>\nDid I mention that all these cinematic shots of the extremely real have been specifically set to music by a multitude of cutting-edge musicians and sound artists? What was I thinking? That\u2019s what makes the whole thing so poetic: the fictional wash poured out by our speakers over the screens, set to the hi-jacked streams of webcams networked throughout our planetary territory.<\/p>\n
There is a lot of waiting. Often we are filmed while waiting and sometimes, people far away watch us wait or, like us, just watch the ficus and yucca grow. Be it waiting for a cut and a shave in London or waiting for laundry to finally be clean and dry in Taule, it makes little difference.<\/p>\n
Look, someone is doing laundry in Taule!<\/p>\n
Some people also work, a bit, here and there. A little bit at a printing press in Dortmund, a little bit in a metal factory in Bucharest. Do we keep the workers under surveillance to discourage them from working on side-projects, or are the cameras just there to prove that somebody, somewhere, is working?<\/p>\n
Often Japan or Iceland is chosen. Am I supposed to read the over-representation of these two islands as reflecting the artist\u2019s longing for countries that are financially inaccessible, or a nostalgia for studying abroad on the taxpayer\u2019s dime? A question that doesn\u2019t seem to concern the lanterns gently bobbing up and down in Shibukawa, or the tide as it rises on a jetty in Reykjavik.<\/p>\n
There are fixed frames of giant pendulums that are anything but fixed. One might think that watching them over prolonged periods of time might lead to the ultimate hypnotic experience in re-broadcasted images, but no. When it comes to saturating the mind and body, I prefer the classics: frontal shots of altars in various chapels, churches and cathedrals where nothing really happens. Maybe an old lady will move, or a candelabrum will fall over? No, nothing, ever, aside from Sunday morning, of course, but then I\u2019m no longer in front of my screen, I\u2019m at church. Apparently one time, during the week, there was a funeral, but I stupidly missed it, probably I was distracted by something in the here and now and not busy looking elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Credits: Inspired by an original concept by Christophe Demarthe, created by Optical Sound (Pierre Belo\u00fcin & P. Nicolas Ledoux) and la manufacture des Cact\u00e9es (Didier Hochart & Thierry Weyd), graphic design by ABM Studio, development by Didier Hochart.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not over, not yet, or were those just the opening credits following a prologue that went on for too long? It happens.<\/p>\n
Nature, when poorly filmed, is even more boring than in real life.
\nOn some crude plastic cubes in primary colors, dogs await their masters inside a gated yard, barking in silence as absolutely no vans drive past, at least not in Glennwood Springs, Bl\u00e5vands Huk, La Laguna, Saint-Malo, Bordeaux, or even Bologna; not in Cologne, Bucharest, Rome, Tsukumi, Saint-Petersburg, Palmares; not in Taipei or Syracuse, not in Miami, Amot, Tucson, or Hamburg, not in Kijiang, Orlando, Moscow or Reykjavik, not in Tokyo or Osaka, Osnabruck or Diement; not in Seoul, Louisville, Herndon, Basslake, Indianapolis, Livermore, Boston, nor in London; not in Marans, Almere Stad, Devils Lake, Meudon, Nuuk, Almeria; not in Bismarck, Seattle, or Kawagoe, not in Beinette, Munich, Arjeplog, Nuremberg, Tijuana, Haarlem, Larvik, Posen, Heidelberg, Casalgrande, Berk-Plage; not in Deggendorf, Angern and der March, Vlissingen, Mobile, Maloy; not in Shibukawa, Notrees, Oldenberg or Hiroshima; not in Kozmin Wielkopolski, Zion, Hayu, Vestmannaeyar, Joeuf, Brest, Hong Kong or Nemuro; not in Taule or the Midlands, not in Balestrand or Otaru or Trinec or Woodland Hills, not in Helsinki, not in Falkenberg, not in Ukkohalla, not in Piemonte, nor Positano, Gr\u00fcnhain-Beierfeld, Mulhouse or Falun, and even less in Clonakilty, at least, for the time being.<\/p>\n
Here a camping car is crossing a bridge. There it has already passed.<\/p>\n
There is a specter haunting the world: it is the specter of reality-TV, if not that of reality. Even if, in the end, the screens remain relatively unpopulated (aside from a few zombies wandering through pixel land), the omnipresence of cameras in this re-broadcasted world make us yearn for an event, an accident, the unexpected to occur within this vast and dismal plain of generalized boredom. Like a phenomenological study of nighttime, when things should never just appear but always emerge from the darkness, we hope to witness in the banality of daily life a falling bridge, a brawl between customers, panda coitus, a windmill that chops a seagull to bits, a shooting star or even a monk at the pulpit rabidly announcing God\u2019s demise. But none of this ever happens, ever, and we know that we are actually just attracted to the sad trivialness of the live feed, the infinite deferral of digital sensing, and there are no more voyeurs here than in front of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.<\/p>\n
In Costa Rica, a privileged person tries putt and seems to miss. The poor resolution of the zoom makes it hard to be sure, but the fact that the golfer does not head directly to the hole, nor in some random direction either, but just next to it, makes us look again more closely.<\/p>\n
Sometimes a live feed does random things. Since it is subject to the data rate, it sometimes turns into a slide show, then a photograph, then speeds up, slows down again, brakes, exactly. And so the actors disappear and reappear in the scenery, anarchically teletransported throughout the frame. Although for us their journey took a few instants, for them it was immediate\u2014a paradox of time and space travel that shifts how we anticipate day-to-day life.<\/p>\n
A machine in Orlando that is maybe a flight simulator seems to be temporarily on pause. The inside of the cockpit is turned off and the only thing still lit up, in the back, is a curved panoramic screen filling the entire room and paused on a median line from ground to sky, planted in the upper part of a row of tree silhouettes.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, here at home, the screen is dark while a little wheel of white strips turns in place to remind us to wait; there is a connection problem. Far away, the camera has been disconnected. Technical error, sabotage, accident, an overweight pigeon, how can we know? The fact is, here a little white wheel started to turn and the music is playing, since there was never any doubt about synchronizing with the real, and so you\u2019re surprised, and if the music seduces you, you just keep watching this white wheel that turns instead of a waiting room full of promise and expectation\u2014the disappointment between reality, its transmission and complete malfunction confined by the infra-thin.
\nAn elevator in Herndon; you want to chance upon an interaction, not a sexual one, just an interaction. But for now there is none. You would need two people for that desire to be filled, but for now there is nobody, so we\u2019re far from being satisfied. The floor is covered in plastic imitation tile. There is nothing to help me confirm or deny this assumption, aside from the logic in the back of my mind that a real tiled floor would simply be too heavy for a motorized device in constant motion. When I\u2019m done staring at this empty elevator, remember to look up the weight per square meter of tile flooring on the Internet\u2014a random fact worth knowing, or at least a conversation-starter\u2014and perhaps also look up what kind of power elevator motors have today. Maybe they even manage.<\/p>\n
The artists were asked to choose amongst a giant mass of live webcam streams and create an original soundtrack for their selection, as one might for a fiction or documentary film. There are several sites that already compile live streams, you just have to tap into them, some are intentionally left open to public\u2014potentially global\u2014scrutiny, like weather or traffic cams, or cams to verify a service or a work in progress, others seem to just be available because someone forget to lock them up. Sometimes you can sniff out the reason behind an artist\u2019s choice, it relates to the narrative specificities of one image in particular, or to the real or imagined memory of a place, or maybe to a comedic aspect, an incongruity with the subject or frame, or maybe both. In most cases, the choice seems motivated by cruel, perhaps even exotic, banality\u2014a grey-beige gently moving swath onto which music can be projected to make a minimalist music video, it seems inevitable to share this way today, while the music without the image can just wander streets, train stations, metros and airports in a world that is increasingly off-limits, for many in a real and physical way, for others in a virtual way via these so-called social networks. The music, more or less close to its melodic epicenter, more or less close to the fringes that are sound poetry and phonography, generally spreads out in twenty-minute segments, the time it takes to lay out the terrain, get immersed in a substrata of sound, respond to an unexpected invitation, arrive with hands empty, to get bored a bit at first but then, often, not want to leave\u2014the time it also takes to fill one side of a record, but that was before.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe knows she\u2019s being filmed\u201d is the caption for one stream, and today, this warning comes from a private home in Seattle, harkening Godard\u2019s cinematic eye. A living room with four seats, each one different: an oval one in pistachio green, one asymmetrical and wine-colored, another deep purple without armrests, and another one that is grey and bigger than the rest. That is where she is sitting. Between fifty and seventy years old, hard to say, striped sweater and soft pants, short hair for practical reasons, one leg folded under her posterior, completely relaxed like her abdominal belt and goiter. A console with one leg is placed in front of her so she can see her laptop. Maybe she is watching herself on Acoustic Cameras? Vertigo. A black cat comes up next to her and seems interested in an object that she is touching on the console: a remote control which, no doubt, just turned on a television hung on the wall in front of her, out of frame. She is snacking. The cat curls up on her knees. Above her head, on the wall, two glass frames reflect the leafy trees moving in the window over yonder, on the balcony. In the corner of the room, a lamp is too complicated. Almost directly in front of us, on the oval chair, sit three small colorful stuffed animals, between them and our heroine stands a square-shaped piece of furniture that could be a coffee table or footrest. It is fascinating and, I grant you, slightly more voyeuristic than contemplating a Caspar David Friedrich. The cat exits the scene. I cannot stop watching her watch her screens.<\/p>\n
The music, instrumental for the most part, turns every stream into a film scene. The prizes go to suspense and tragedy. The famous uncanny, that timeworn term, could never find a better contemporary atmosphere to describe than this. The discrepancy between sound and image brings out this feeling, this break from the reassuring rationality of daily life, the uncanny valley accessed by a cable car of fiber optics. A lettrist, then situationist kind of cinema, the kind that was known for re-appropriating images, find in this context a new torch of alternative modernity to bear, in which there is no meaning affirmed by language. You might also think of David Lynch\u2019s Inland Empire, the deteriorating video image, time expanding, sound effects that seem off. More generally, in Acoustic Cameras there is the consciousness of the winter of the avant-garde, where a few nervous jolts vibrate under the ice of the screen, but we know that the time for dreaming the song of days after next won\u2019t last.<\/p>\n
She got up, she left, like the cat.<\/p>\n
Alright then, get out of here! This attempt at ekphrasis won\u2019t teach you anything new; it\u2019s time to try it yourself. And now, roll the credits: Music (in alphabetical order and not in order of random appearance on screen) by Olivier Alary, Ambassade fran\u00e7aise des royaumes d’Elgaland~Vargaland, Bader Motor, Christophe Bailleau, Aidan Baker, Pierre Bastien, Beau Delay Orchestra, Pierre Belo\u00fcin, Fred Bigot, Herv\u00e9 Birolini, Black Sifichi, Blindfold Babies, Cathryn Boch & Alessandro Bosetti, Rob Bridgett, Laurent Bronner, R\u00e9my Carr\u00e9, Valentin Carette, Mami Chan, Thierry Charollais, Etienne Charry, Richard Chartier, Sylvain Chauveau, Chicaloyoh, Clair Obscur, Cocoon, COH, Dominique Dalcan, The Dead Mauriacs, D\u00e9ficit Des Ann\u00e9es Ant\u00e9rieures, Die Form + Musique Concr\u00e8te, The Digital Intervention, Drahomira Song Orchestra, Leif Elggren, el Tiger Comics Group, Nicol Eltzroth Rosendorf, eRikm, Eveb From Wild Shores, Simon Fisher Turner, Marine Fr\u0153liger, Fuchs & Beckette, Bertrand Gauguet featuring Philippe Poirier, Nico Guerrero, Michel Guillet, Hifiklub, Yoko Higashi, Jarboe, Jez riley French, Nicolas Jorio, Edward Ka-Spel, K\u00f6hn, KMG, Felix Kubin, Blaine L. Reininger, P. Nicolas Ledoux, Lefdup & Lefdup, Le Plus Simple Appareil, Rainier Lericolais, Les Voix Anim\u00e9es, Francisco L\u00f3pez, Lionel Marchetti, St\u00e9phane Marin, Mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, Joachim Montessuis, Georges Moraitis, Pascale Murtin, BJ Nilsen, Charles Pennequin, Barry Prophet, Nobodisoundz, The Option, Jean-Jacques Palix, Laurent Pernice, Pest Modern, Christophe Petchanatz, Pinkcourtesyphone, Fran\u00e7ois Possem\u00e9, Postco\u00eftum, Puce Moment, Quattrophage, Radiomentale, S\u00e9bastien Roux, Peter Shams, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Sanchez, Ravi Shardja, Scanner, Son, Gilles Sornette, Super Reverb, Samon Takahashi, Gauthier Tassart, Tempsion, That Summer, Schneider TM, St\u00e9phane Thidet, JG Thirlwell, Christian Vialard, Franck Vigroux, Val\u00e9rie Vivancos, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Tony Wakeford, Wankers United, XX019 und Motto, Thierry Weyd, Daniel John Williams, Tying Tiffany, Year Of No Light, Yrsel and 2kilos.<\/p>\n
Did I warn you that the hidden scene would be as long as the movie? Maybe even longer, it depends. Go ahead and grab another stream, let\u2019s go again!
\n[rl_gallery id=”10971″]<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
www.acousticcameras.org<\/a><\/p>\nTranslation by Maya Dalinsky<\/p>\n
Cover and gallery: Stills from webcam streams broadcasted and set to music on Acoustic Cameras<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And so the great film of reality drifts on, promising to capture, highlight and amplify the website Acoustic Cameras. If, for example, you find yourself in a melancholic state of mind and stuck inside of Mobile (where the sun is shining, the waters of the Gulf of Mexico make gentle waves and the palm trees<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101027,"featured_media":10988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1843],"tags":[1877],"corpus":[],"post_types":[1206],"associate_editors":[],"authors":[1281],"class_list":["post-10963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","tag-dystopia","post_types-investigation-2-en","authors-arnaud-maguet"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10963"},{"taxonomy":"corpus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/corpus?post=10963"},{"taxonomy":"post_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_types?post=10963"},{"taxonomy":"associate_editors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/associate_editors?post=10963"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=10963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}