Archives du mot-clé artistic practices

Experimental (English version)

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The term “experimental” remains difficult to define in artistic contexts, and concerning PaaLabRes’ particular issues, it poses a certain number of problems. A first definition seemingly suitable to artistic practices goes towards the idea of trying out things in link with experience. Any sound production practice implies a degree of trial and error, of experimentation in order to achieve a desired outcome. One carries out a series of trials in order to arrive at a solution that is satisfying to the practitioner’s ear or to the external listeners’ ones. Through reference to experience, one implies that the trials are carried out in the framework of an interaction between a human being and some concrete material. This first determination of the meaning of the word is situated far from the definition of experimental in the sense of scientific research, which, according to the Petit Robert dictionary, can be described in the following manner: “Empirical experience which consists in observing, classifying, making hypotheses and verifying through appropriate experiences”.

However, for some years practicing musicians (instrumentalists, singers,…) have been present in the university, and this implied the necessity to contemplate the question of research in a manner appropriate to their situation. If the very act of interpretation can be considered as constituting, under certain conditions, an original creation in itself, it is then possible to propose the notion of experimental as being the best way to provide a framework for a research process: it would not only be a question of playing, but of defining a project similar to the empiric experience described above.

The definition of experimental is made more complicated by the fact that this term has been used to describe particular aesthetic movements inscribed in a singular historical context. On the one hand, John Cage and his circle have been very often described as typical of what we call “experimental music ».1 The well-known definition by Cage of the term experimental conditions its utilization on not considering it as the description of an act that can be after the fact judged successful or failed, but rather on considering it as an act the result of which one cannot know in advance.2 He emphasizes here an elaboration process in which the will of the composer creator should be absent, in which the agency and the nature of the sounds are not determined from the beginning, and which does not predict the way listeners might experience them. The term experimental has also been used to describe 20th Century composers – most of them Americans, inspired by pragmatism (Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Edgar Varèse, Harry Partch, Robert Erickson, etc.) – who refused to found their music on conceptual theories, and who turned their attention to the materiality of sound production. It is also on this idea of more direct production of sound matter, that electroacoustic music has been qualified as “experimental music”: electronic and concrete music studios had taken on the aspect of scientific laboratories. The label “experimental music” is applied today to an infinite number of practices, especially when they are difficult to categorize in a specific traditional genre.

This multiplicity of meanings, in certain cases very vague, results often in misunderstandings, and the role of “experimental” in the collection of concepts within the PaaLabRes collective remains particularly uncertain and unstable. We will limit its use to the perspective of a definition of what could constitute research in artistic domains. In this context, the Orpheus Institute in Ghent (Belgium) has recently published a book (Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, Michael Schwab (ed.), Orpheus Institute, Leuwen (Belgium): Leuwen University Press, 2013). This publication is centered on the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger3, director of the Max Planck Institute for the history of sciences, which is based notably on experimental systems, with some perspectives on eventual applications to artistic domains. For this author, experimental systems are articulated around four categories:

  1. There should be an intimate, interactive relation between scientific objects and their conditions of technical production, in an inseparable manner. This relation is at the same time local, individual, social, institutional, technical, instrumental and above all epistemic. He emphasizes the hybrid character of experimental systems and because of this, their impure nature.
  2. Experimental systems have to be able to produce surprises constituting new forms of knowledge. They have to be conceived in ways producing differential results that are not predictable. They have a certain autonomy, a life of their own.
  3. They should be able to produce epistemic traces (what the author describes under the term of “graphematicity”), which show and incarnate their signifying products and which can be represented in writing.
  4. Experimental systems should be able to enter networks that include other experimental groups, by means of conjunctures and bifurcations, forming thus experimental cultures.4.

Rheinberger speaks of “experimental spirit”. For him on the one hand, at the core of this concept lies the interaction between the experimental investigator and the material, which implies that, in order to create new situations, the investigator is immersed in the material. Here, as with Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, the material exists in itself and the interaction implies a relation that goes in two-ways. On the other hand, this experimental spirit proceeds from a particular attention to the fact that science is a practice rather than a theoretical system, he therefore advocates assuming inductive rather than deductive attitudes.5 It is here question of getting rid of the idea that a theory of knowledge is centered on an ego, a subject trying to apply a network of theories on an object. The experimental situations have to correspond to two requirements: a) a precision in elaborating a context; and b) a sufficient complexity in order to leave the door open for surprises.6

For Rheinberger, an “experimental system” can only be understood as a play of interactions between machines, ingredients, techniques, rudimentary concepts, vague objects, protocols, research notes, social and institutional conditions. The experiments are not just methodological vehicles to test (to be confirmed or rejected) some already theoretically established or hypothetically postulated knowledge, as philosophy of sciences usually claims. Knowledge is generated by experiments – of which no one had any idea beforehand.7

At the core of scientific processes of experimentation, according to Rheinberger, epistemic things and technical objects exist in dialectical interrelations. The epistemic things are defined as entities “ ‘whose unknown characteristics are the target of an experimental inquiry’, paradoxically, embodying what one does not yet know. »8 The technical objects are defined as sedimentations of old epistemic things, they are scientific objects that incarnate instituted knowledge in a determined field of research, at a given time; they can be instruments, apparatus, mechanisms that delimitate and confine the evaluation of epistemic things. The epistemic things are necessarily under determinate, the technical objects on the contrary are determined in characteristic manner. Rheinberger states:

In Towards a History of Epistemic Things I wanted to convey the idea that the experimental process plays out a dialectic between epistemic things and technical objects, and that there exists a functional relationship between them rather than a substantial one. Epistemic things that have reached a certain point of clarification can be transformed into technical objects – and vice versa: technical objects can become epistemically problematic again. The technologies with which one works are normally used as black boxes; they can, however, be reopened and become things of epistemic interest.9

Michael Schwab, in his introduction to the book, interprets the idea of experimental cultures as fit to bear on research in artistic domains, providing that one would have a more supple approach than the ones used in science:

During my conversation with Rheinberger (chapter 15 of the book), it became clear that a particular type of work ethic, experience, and sensibility is required in experimental systems that can also be found in artistic practice: dedication to a limited sets of materials, attention to detail, continuous iterations, and the inclusion of contingent events and traces in the artistic process, allowing the material substrata to come to the fore as a site where traces are assembled.10.

Schwab raises three issues that are at the heart of PaalabRes’ questioning relative to research in artistic domains:

  1. All artistic practices, to the extent that they confront materials to ways of treating them, can pretend to be experimental systems. In what way can one distinguish artistic research from any artistic practice production?
  2. The question of newness, of originality, of future, of progress, inscribed in the requirements specification of scientific research, as well as in the artistic modernity called “experimental music”, became in a subtle manner in the course of the 20th Century an idea that belongs probably to the past.
  3. There is a general crisis of representation, which leads us to wonder if the academic forms of research publication are appropriate for the artistic domains, and if other alternative forms of representation more suitable to practices can be used.

Moreover, one can ponder with Henk Bordgorff:

What is the epistemological status of art in artistic research? Are artworks or art practices capable of creating, articulating, and embodying knnowledge and understanding? And, if so, what kinds of artworks and practices do this (what is the ontological status of art here?) and how they do it (the methodological status)?11.

The notion of experimental remains a necessary term when contemplating the specificities of research in artistic domains, but its manipulation remains very problematic because of the multiplicity of references it generates, notably by the fact that it is often claimed as the exclusive territory of modernity in the European high art tradition.

In conclusion, we will refer to Paolo de Assis, a composer and researcher at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, who proposes a pathway for thinking about artistic research on a basis somewhat different from the ones proposed by musical analysis, music theory and musicology turned as they are towards the interpretation of works from the past:

However, there might be a different mode of problematising things, a mode that, rather than aiming to retrieve what thingsare, searches for new ways of productively exposing them. That is to say, a mode that, instead of critically looking into the past, creatively projects things into the future. Such is the final proposal of this chapter: to reverse the perspective from « looking into the past » to creatively designing the future of past musical works. In my view this is precisely what artistic research could be about – a creative mode that brings together the past and the future of things in ways that non-artistic modes cannot do. In doing this, artistic research must be able to include archaeology, problematisation, and experimentation in its inner fabric. The making of artistic expérimentation through Rheingerger’s experimental systems becomes a creative form of problematisation, whereby through differential repetition new assemblages of things are materially handcrafted and constructed.12

In PaaLabRes perspectives, it would be necessary to widen the notion of works or things of the past to the practices themselves as they are present in tradition and as they adapt continuously to new contexts.

Jean-Charles François – 2015
Translation by the author and Nancy François

1. See Michael Nyman, Experimental Music : Cage and Beyond, New York : Schirmer Books, 1974, second edition, Cambridge and New York : Cambridge Univesrity Press, 1999.

2. John Cage, Silence, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: M.I.T. Press, 1966, p. 13.

3. « Hans-Jörg Rheinberger taught molecular biology and history of sciences at the Universities of Salzburg, Innsbrück, Zürich, Berlin, and Standford, and he is the director of the MaxPlanck-Institut in Berlin since 1997. Influenced by Jacques Derrida’s thought, he co-translated Grammatology, he argue for a historical epistemology, principally centered on experimental systems » (www.diaphane.fr)

4. See Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, « Experimental Systems : Entry Encyclopedia for the History of the Life Sciences » The Visual Laboratory : Essays and Ressources on the Experimentalization of Life, Max Planck Institut for the History of Science, Berlin. http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/essays/data/enc19?p=1
A chart is presented in Paulo de Assis « Epistemic Complexity and Experimental Systems », Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, Michael Schwab (ed.), Orpheus Institute, Leuwen, Belgique : Leuwen University Press, 2013, p. 158.

5. See « Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in conversation with Michael Schwab », Experimental Systems,…, op. cit., p. 198.

6. Ibid., p. 200.

7. See Henk Borgdorff, « Artistic Practices and Epistemic Things », in Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, op. cit., p.114.

8. See Paulo de Assis, op. cit., p. 159. He quotes Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2004, p.238.

9. Ibid.

10. Michael Schwab, « Introduction », Experimental Systems…, op. cit., p. 7.

11 Henk Borgdorff, op. cit., p. 113.

12. Paulo de Assis, op. cit., p. 162.

 

 

 For an itinerary-song towards…


 

Transversal (English version)

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For an
itinerary-song
towards…

 
 
The station « Transversal » is composed, on the one hand, of a collective text written by the members of PAALabRes in the form of an “exquisite corpse” game, each contribution being visually presented in different manners, and, on the other hand, by three transversal escapes: a) a text on the notion of hybrid and on related artistic forms; b) a text with references to the “créolisation” of the world according to Edouard Glissant; and c) a text with references to the idea of plural culture, according to, among others, Michel de Certeau.

 

Contents:

« Transversal »: Paalabres Collective
Hybrid
« Créolisation »
Culture in the Plural
 
Return to the French text

 

Transversal – Paalabres Collective

This is a spineless concept difficult to grasp.
If one replaces “v” par “p”, one would get something that would transpierce, that would have a phallocentric impact. But a transversal line only traverses and one has difficulties to stop it in its trajectory, and to reflect upon it.

To pierce the clouds, to traverse them. To transgress.

If one replaces “v” by “f”, one would get transfer (of stocks?), transition to the inflexibility of fer-ruginous matter. But the idea of transport (travel, love-making?) imbedded in “trans” is to go in “verses” towards indeterminacy, in a peregrination of diverse perverse fevers. One would be carried away by the trans-fair.

In ball games, “transversal” means a long passing shot across the width of the field that would reverse the game. Then, one has to be clever, skillful in sending and receiving the ball. This implies not only the receiver of this pass, but also all the participants. One never sufficiently considers the things and the people that make the actions possible. We should not forget that all penalty shots at 3 points in the net are welcome, and please not on the post!

And if one starts by taking out the “n”… The noises, the images, the odors, the tastes, the contacts and the senses traverse, in reverse also, and then diverge, and do the inverse too, whether going into a trance or not.

— You said trans, transverse and salsa, vestal, transversal?

Beware, above all to not replace the “v” by a “grrrr” of aggressive transgression.

— My transversal, but what’s the matter with my transversal?

The “it” of intestinal transit should be avoided, of sonata transition, of transitory elements in sound envelopes in the acoustical domain.

Is transversal anything that cuts across perpendicularly the longitudinal axis of an elongated form. And this is very important! For example, in modern differential topology, the study of which, it should be remembered, was started by René Thom on ideas by Poincaré (Henri, the cousin of Raymond) and which is based on the notion of transverse sub-varieties. Good night.

Certain persons go as far as saying that the dislocations of the earth’s crust are transversal faults, according to cnrtl!

To go directly to something.

In musical practices “in acts”, do not believe that financial transactions are part of them.

See the synonyms of “transversal”, there is no antonym?

The notion of instability refers to something unsteady, fragile, wavering between two ideas. Should we rather understand it as “never having the expected form”; “going towards”, etc?
The idea of transversal consists in having all the terms like fragility, stammering, attempts, round trips, displacements, migrations, transfers, etc., converge in a logic of an absolutely inexorable evolution, proper to the life of practices.

To what is it opposed?
It is opposed to, say: root, race, origin, purity, original sin, DNA …

Dog – Reality is not below the animal, even if political. It is not around, it is not to be seized, it is not a framework, not a finality. Reality is something you traverse. Writing, living in general, it is always something to be traversed.

Vestal trance, vesperal tramp, Enter the versed ballad

According to who says it, it is a real travelling across, or the use of an institutional language that does not change anything.

“One arrives somewhere, one comes out again, then it continues, one does not know where it leads; I like this idea of a music that is there, that one grasps at a given moment, it opens out, and then it closes, and in fact the music continues, it continues to leave some traces.”

Situated across something

Everything would be fairly clear if within each large category of practice we were in presence of a unity of comportments and of aesthetics. Now, the diversity of modes of functioning is not organized in borders defining genres, but is expressed within each genre in itself. For example, in the jazz world, some people want to work only with written scores, and others, on the contrary, like to insist on the conditions of an oral transmission. In the contemporary music world, almost no relationships exist between those who write scores, those who improvise, and those who have chosen to express themselves with electroacoustic means. In traditional world music one can find those who are aiming to recreate the authenticity of a disappearing social practice, and those who want to adapt their practice to the conditions of our own social life. In amplified music, there are only few common points in the ways of doing things between techno, hip-hop, rock, and those who are influenced by other types of music. One could say that every day, in all domains, a new genre emerges.

Transversal is always a transfer salve,
it obliges to anoint ones own practices with improper elements.
You can’t traverse, go across, without getting wet.
The traverse stains.
Traverse mucks up (traverse yuk!).

It does not always happen as expected, sometimes it slips… through the net,
it falls in the trap set…, sometimes it travels not straight.

The traversion, it is the aversion of the traverse: it has to go straight

some think that they are not transversable, the damn fools!

A music of the present time can be envisioned, as time unfolding in the making that in a way would oblige us to break with the habits of classifying in trends, aesthetics, genres, cultural influences, so as really refusing any identification to already known consensual frameworks that tend to place the artists before a paradox: one should invent in continuity, search for ideas, without exceeding the limits, create a new thread, some newness but without escaping the context organized by designations, as if these designations were there for ever, whereas they themselves appeared at a given moment, in order to get rid of other paradigms, to qualify something that the old classifications were not able to grasp.

“When a group is formed, one knows that it is composed by individualities. Each person is able to develop her/his projects alone. The equilibrium is found in co-construction, in which whoever pretends to be the leader [chef] is nothing more than a liar [menteur]: each person is at his/her place and the detail is discussed more and more. These are musical discussions in the course of elaborating propositions, each one speaks and may intervene. The decisions are always based on common choices.

In transverse, of transvermeil, through transverb, to the transvair.

Decompartmentalize

“One arrives somewhere, one comes out again, then it continues, one does not know where it leads, I like this idea of some cooking that is grasped at a given moment, it opens and it closes, and in fact, the cooking continues, it still leaves some traces.”

In the conception of transversal, it would be as inappropriate to say that such or such creation mixes influences from diverse origins, as to say it comes from somewhere or from nowhere; it is best not to search for a provenance nor for an affiliation, it is even necessary to renounce contemplating a multicultural origin, or an expression of world music. The origin of a music of transversality is here, there and everywhere: its origin is a project, and the origin of the project a desire for a project shared with musicians who bring to it their personality, their energy and their imagination.

If one utilizes it to keep the compartmentalization and the silos on the pretext of the qualifying value of some sprinkling of actions…

 

Contributions of the PaaLabRes collective— 2015

 

Three transversal escapes

Hybrid
« Créolisation »
Culture in the Plural
 

 For an itinerary-song, towards…


 

Nomadism, Nomadic

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Drawing : Alain Savouret

 

For an
Itinerary-song
towards…

 
Nomadic :  » What is not established, has no fixed dwelling « 1. This term when applied to the arts, can have, in the framework of PaaLabRes, several meanings :

  • Artistic practices, which are inscribed in constantly reinvented processes, rather than the presence of stable, definitive and immutable objects or works (even though they might be constantly reinterpreted).
  • Artistic practices, which are conceived in continuity within and outside institutions, between formal and informal learning, or which use the institutional settings for their own ends.
  • Artistic practices, which refuse stylistic labels and promote the active coexistence of aesthetical positions, their effective meeting, or their blending together.
  • Artistic practices which are situated in mediating spaces in between disciplines or domains of thought: any hybrid forms that are impossible to definitively classify in a single category of action; anything that aggregates theory and practice in the same act.

The idea of nomadism determines the overall form of this present “media set-up” in which this text is included, drawing from the experience of Australian Aboriginal people (see the English Editorial).

Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, in a chapter entitled “Treatise on Nomadology: the War Machine”, described the presence of a “minor” or “nomadic” science, which strongly distinguishes itself from scientific practices in the “royal” sense of the term2 :

The characteristics of such an eccentric science would be as follows: 1) First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of solids treating fluids as a special case; (…). 2) The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant. (…). 3) One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a lamellar or laminar flow, but from curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane; (…). 4) Finally, the model is problematic, rather than theorematic.3

In the first proposition in this quote, Deleuze and Guattari draw on a contrast between “striated” space and “smooth” space, concepts borrowed from Boulez’s writings on music. If one takes up the proposed hydraulic image, a river consists in a partly random constant flow, from which the detail is difficult to perceive. A complex sound wave (the sound of the river for example) is of the same nature, a constant flow of sinuosity impossible to analyze without establishing some points of reference. In order to understand the river, one has to striate the space by noticeable spots distinct from each other: a rock, a bridge, an islet, etc. In order to understand sound, some discontinuity has to be established: the musical notes do not interrupt the flow of the complex sound wave, but they allow the identification by the ears of stable melodic lines, easy to recognize through repetitions, while the sound of a stream flow at a given point will only appear as a special effect, as a particular case. This is indeed one of the problematical foundations of stabilized musical parameters (precise pitch, precise durations, distinct from each other), which on the one hand are constitutive of Western musical notation, and on the other hand also entail some instable parameters, such as timbre in particular, which is inscribed in some continuity (dynamic envelopes, constantly evolving sound spectra, subtle inflections, micro-variations, etc.) and which would touch on what cannot be precisely written. This phenomenon can be interpreted, in our collective’s perspectives, as a differentiation between music centered on stable elements, with successions of identifiable notes, and music centered on timbre, on sound in itself, being understood that neither the one nor the other can dispense with the presence of a mixture of stable and instable elements: notes without timbres are too synthetic, the timbres without asperities soon become fastidious. “Nomadic” musicians would be drawn towards instable sound productions.

In the quote’s second proposition, the notion of heterogeneity in processes “in progress”, implies, in the present nomadic context, leaving indeterminate a great part of the sound production, rather than definitely fixing the detail of the contours. Rather than analyzing separately each parameter in order to control them, the approach that leaves the sonorities to unfold in all their complexity presupposes considering sound in its heterogeneous totality involving the interactivity of the parameters and not their separation. The question of heterogeneity can be expanded to social interactions, in relations to different groups or practices: social mix in a given practice, confrontation between practices, genres and styles, confrontation between artistic domains, hybrid forms, creolized cultures, cross-cultural expressions, plural declinations of culture. Nomadic would be the ones who would not seek to defend a single identity disqualifying all the others, the ones who are ready to assume several roles, taking the risk of not artificially grafting a particular role on to another, taking the risk to fully assume the imposed conditions given by each situation, without at the same time being attached to a rigid definition of each role taken separately.

Concerning the third proposition of the two authors’ quote, it relates to the concepts developed by Michel de Certeau on the differentiation between strategy and tactic. In strategy, usually imposed from above by some power, the lines are clearly defined by objectives to be attained, the space is rationalized in functional perspectives, the laws define what it is allowed, and above all what is not allowed. Tactics are answers to situations that arise, often resulting from strategy, immediately reacting to them in order to reap some benefits. Strategy traces future lines of conduct, enlightened by historical facts from the past, tactics are embedded in the meanders of reality in a continual present. The nomad thus would be the one who in a pragmatic manner allows the world to follow its course, in reacting to circumstances, with the danger of never being able to master it, nor perhaps to change it.

Finally, the fourth point of the definition, the idea of “nomadic” consists in being confronted with the complexity of things and situations, and, as their evolution occurs, in elaborating a series of questions capable of defining a comportment of action. It is not a matter of establishing some laws, or inescapable truths, some “theorems”, which will induce acceptable comportments, but of determining a balanced pathway on the crest between catastrophic precipices, in between wayward excesses on each side of the track charting its course, a pathway which problematizes complex reality. The nomad would be the one who does not simplify reality in categorical precepts easily understood, but who confronts the variable complexity of the globalized world.

The idea of nomadism is, according to Daniel Charles, linked to the notion developed during the 20th Century of “un-working” [désœuvrement], not in the sense of not knowing what to do with one’s time, or of being outside the official field of work, but in the sense of being removed from the concept of work (of art) identified by a finished object.4. Daniel Charles refers principally to John Cage, whose scores often imply processes that determine sounds or events independently of the composer and localized in the particular realization of a creative performer. The score is not any more a unique work, but can result in an infinity of potential works. In connection to this notion, Daniel Charles refers to Pierre Lévy’s work on computer applications to artistic domains, in which “the use of digital tools leads to the concept of templates for possible works ».5 The artist does not produce a work but designs a software – Pierre Lévy speaks of open source software, template or hypertext – which will generate automatically an infinite number of versions that are particular “instances” of the same structuration.

For us, the notion of nomadism, influenced by the new technologies and by world economy, has to be considered in a much wider manner. The idea of “un-working” has to be taken literally and includes the importance in today’s society of wandering and precariousness and unemployment. This also includes the cultural domain in the broad sense, in a society of leisure, in artistic forms that are often disparaged, in anonymous activities outside the public scene and the sphere of publicity.

A possible interpretation of the term “nomadic” has to do with its antonymous relationship with the term “sedentary”, as developed by Isabelle Stengers in a chapter of the seventh volume of Cosmopolitics, “Nomadic and Sedentary ». She describes this distinction between these two terms as eminently dangerous, as they lend themselves to many “misunderstandings”. Nomadic people (those who come from elsewhere in order to disturb the life routines) are rejected by the sedentary ones, but in our society, the sedentary people are those who “reject the challenges of modernity”, hanging on to their quiet little world, the nomads being those who are ready to risk changing society.6 Nomadism soon becomes an obligatory pathway towards progress and to avant-garde artistic forms attempting to make a complete break with the past. The nomadic norm could very well be considered from that perspective as sedentary. The two terms can be completely turned around in relation to particular contexts. Consequently, for Stengers, they have to be “kept in tension”.

But the sense that we want to emphasize concerning nomadism lies at the same time outside the field of institutional sedentary settlements and outside the wandering of experimental modernists without necessarily excluding them. The space of nomadism is a localized place in which the nomads move on an everyday life basis, with not much importance given to the place they might move to, as do the artisans who care about their own everyday practices without claiming to open new territories. The nomads can suddenly invade other territories perpetrating predatory raiding, but they then return to their delimited roaming at home. The smooth space is punctuated by significant objects, by striations, it is bounded by some limits. To come back to Mille Plateaux:

The nomad has a territory, he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). (…) Although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine (…). A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo.7

Jean-Charles François – 2015
Translation by the author and Nancy François

1. Translated from the dictionary Le nouveau Petit Robert, Paris : Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1967/2002, p. 1736

2. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (pp. 351-423). It should be noted that the concept of “nomad” is for these authors associated with the idea of the “war machine”. It is an external space to the state apparatus with its two head figures, the king-magician and the priest-jurist. This war machine can be recuperated by the states in order to effectively carry on wars, the nomad space is a war machine which does not necessarily use effective war.

3. Ibid., p. 446-447 of the French edition.

4. Daniel Charles, Musiques nomades, écrits réunis et présentés par Christian Hauer, Paris: Editions Kimé, 1998, chapters 15 and 16, pp. 211-231.

5. Pierre Lévy, La machine univers, Paris: Ed. de la Découverte, 1987, p.61.

6. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, Bononno, R (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2010), “The Curse of Tolerance”, chapter on “Nomadic and Sedentary”.

7. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p.471 of the French edition.

 For an itinerary-song towards…

 

English : Editorial

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ENGLISH EDITORIAL 2016 “PaaLabRes’ map”

ENGLISH EDITORIAL 2017 “Graphic Scores”

ENGLISH EDITORIAL 2021 “Break down the walls”

PaaLabRes: Artistic Practices in Acts, Laboratory of Research

Welcome on the first version of the digital space PaaLabRes.

PaaLabRes (Pratiques Artistiques en Actes, Laboratoire de Recherches or Artistic Practices in Acts, Research Laboratory) is a musicians’ collective in existence since 2011, which attempts to define the outlines of artistic research led by the practitioners themselves, concerning artistic expressions that do not result in definitive works. In an initial text[1], the collective was defined in the following manner:

“Electronic technologies created the conditions for the emergence of a great diversity of artistic practices, by  allowing considerable access to information about the world and its history. Many practices differentiate themselves both from institutions representing sacred traditions and from commercial cultural industries, in order to invent everyday – very often in a collective manner – their own “art of doing”[2]. We will call these artistic practices “nomadic[3] and transverse”, because they tend to refuse to be fixed in definitive works by continuously reworking matters and techniques according to particular situations, and they tend also to refuse any aesthetic labels (or labels connected to professional identities) by tinkering on an everyday basis along transverse paths.”

PaaLabRes objective is to bring together in action, reflection and research, diverse practices that cannot be closely identified with the definitively fixed patrimonial art forms, nor with the ones imposed by cultural industries. These practices often open ways to collective creation, to improvisation, and to collaborative projects between the arts, including other interactive forms of production.

Questioning the autonomy of art with respect to society, they are grounded in everyday interactions and in contexts that mix art with sociology, philosophy, in transmission activities and education. Because of these features, these practices remain unstable and variable; they are really nomadic and transversal.

The aim of  PaaLabRes is to mix different media in order to develop original art/research facilitated by Internet communication technology. The objectives are to bridge the gaps between a) legitimate research articles and more experimental or poetical texts and more simple reflective contributions; b) artistic productions and artistic education, c) artistic concerns and societal or political questions; d) a very large diversity of artistic categories, styles or fields.

Important information about the practical conditions for realizing the 2016 and 2017 editions of the digital space “PaaLabRes”

The digital space is developed by the collective PaaLabRes, with Nicolas Sidoroff as the principal contributor. The editorial team is composed by Samuel Chagnard, Jean-Charles François and Nicolas Sidoroff.

The totality of the production of the digital space “PaaLabRes” – architecture of the site, creation, translations, technical aspects of the realization – is done with a complete absence of financial means and on the basis of volunteer work. The digital space comes into reality thanks to the participation of artists who can do this because they are salaried in some educational institution or retired from this duty, and who give their time within the limits of their possibilities. These same persons additionally have to carry on with their own research and/or artistic projects, often pursuing a doctoral degree. Some actions (i.e. workshops) carried out by the PaaLabRes collective generate a small percentage in order to pay for the site’s hosting services.

But how can web platforms and communities developing Internet tools (of “framasoft” type) continue to fight the system? How is it possible to escape the invasion of publicity, which is the counterpart of Internet being free of charge?

In the first 2016 Edition, for example, we used “youtube” in order to realize the 72 Itineraries-Songs. This was an “easy” solution to the problem of the enormous space taken by these files, but one which imposed (through “Google”) the presence of publicity. For the 2017 Edition, we have decided to use the platform “viméo”, which appeared to us to correspond more to our sense of ethics, but the inconvenience of the presence of publicity (“Staffpicks”) remains. The trick we have designed to counter it consists in giving ample time to users to click on internal links of the site before the appearance of any publicity.

The issue of the lack of means for alternative research projects and for the use of digital communication tools remains to be debated. All remarks and good ideas on this subject would be very welcome. And more generally any critical feedback on our endeavors would be of great use to us.
Your comments (in english) can be sent at this address: contact[chez]paalabres[pt]org

The  collective PaaLabRes — 2016 — 2017
Samuel Chagnard, Jean-Charles François, Laurent Grappe,
Karine Hahn, Gilles Laval, Noémi Lefebvre,
Pascal Pariaud, Nicolas Sidoroff, Gérald Venturi.

 

In the future other maps, plans, drawings and lines will be added as needed.

The PaaLabRes collective hopes that the formula of digital space, which is in the process of being developed will be able to host varied contributions, from original hybrid artistic forms to fundamental reflections on today’s artistic practices. It is very important to us to be able to present a diversity in the domains of artistic production, of cultural expressions, of different ways to present research, and of mixing medias. Our project is to develop a dialog between the detachment of formal research and the lightness of discourses without objects, passing through the polemist’s irony, and the vigor of political debates. What is at stake is the place of artistic practices in the complicated context of our multiple society, in three strongly interactive areas: practices, teaching/learning, research, with their particular systemic approaches.

The collective PaaLabRes — 2016
Samuel Chagnard, Jean-Charles François, Laurent Grappe,
Karine Hahn, Gilles Laval, Noémi Lefebvre,
Pascal Pariaud, Nicolas Sidoroff, Gérald Venturi.

 

[1] See « 1. Paalabres. Projets de Pratiques Artistiques en Actes, Laboratoire de Recherche », in Revue&Corrigée N°95, March 2013.

[2] See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984.

[3] See Daniel Charles, Musiques nomades, Paris : Editions Kimé, 1998.

 

English : Paarticipation

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PaaLabRes: Forum of Discussion

The digital space PaaLabRes should also be a discussion forum: a space for debate, interactions, comments, and suggestions. The exact form of this interactive forum between the collective PaaLabRes and the site’s users remains to be developed in detail.

It is very important for us to have immediate feedback on the technical aspects of the site, because we are developing it with our own limited means. Critical comments on the way users navigate in the architecture of the site, indicating what should be improved, are welcome.

Our intention is to organize the discussion forum in several territories. Firstly, a space for brief contributions by the site’s visitors (one page maximum): commentaries, critical feedback, encouragements, and suggestions. Secondly, longer texts concerning useful information for the site’s community: stories of various experiences, events, conferences, publications that can have a particular interest relative to the questions raised by PaaLabRes. Thirdly, more substantial propositions: research articles, artistic forms, poetical or political texts, etc. Finally, we also hope to organize specific spaces for debate linked to some of the site’s publications (see the end of the text of the station “Débat” on artistic research).

Calls for contributions on particular subject matters will be launched periodically, in order to enrich the existing lines of the site, or to create new ones.

The collective PaaLabRes is in charge of the process of presentation and editing of the various contributions in a spirit of exchange.

The digital space PaaLabRes is addressed to a French speaking audience, to those who do not master foreign languages, notably the English language. The use of French for most of its content is therefore deliberately claimed. At the same time, we are dedicated to be open to international contexts. This is why some translations are already proposed on the site and they will play an important role in future publications. Bilingual publications are possible in the case of original texts, which have not been already published. Each station includes an abstract in English or references to English versions of the texts. Contributions in English are very welcome.