Arrays is a machine, a digital body that comes to life before the audience’s eyes. Its unique song awakens, evokes, provokes, manages, classifies, all of our memories and metaphors, and soon, if we are not careful… our future and perhaps ourselves.
Today, we are in a phase where every element of our material environment is being digitized to reconstruct a living context within the space of virtual data. This phase heralds the one in which we, as singular entities made of flesh and intelligence, will migrate toward becoming agents of the Network, enslaved to the binary logic of a few lines of code. Gradually, our species is renouncing its embodiment in this reality of constraints and possibilities that allowed it to develop from its birth up until the advent of New Technologies. Slowly, our tangible presence in this world fades away, our traces disappearing bit by bit as we transfer them into a data cloud that we wish to construct in the image of what we believe to be Creation. Little by little, we give up uncertainty, doubts, and the questions that our presence in the analog universe has always stirred in us.
Gradually, we surrender, soul and body, to the Manichaeism and the brutal efficiency of the Machine. Is it because our humanity has become unbearable to us that we inevitably tend to merge with the Device?
H.B. / F.D. April 2012
ARRAYS CONCERT @ FRAGMENT – 9 AVRIL 2013 – THÉÂTRE DU SAULCY – © EMILIE SALQUÈBRE
ARRAYS @ MUSIQUE ACTION 2015 © JACKY JOANNES
ARRAYS – the play which premiered on the 1st April 2012 in Paris – was created 10 years before the play TESLA. It described the world to come; a world in which energy has endless uses, an era in which inventions make life easier and herald in the ultimate device: the computer.
After 1898, Nikola Tesla registered many patents for devices that used the “logic gate”, a stepping stone to the modern computer. He was ahead of his time and his intuition proved to be correct; but electric energy was only at the beginning of a long adventure. In the face of the surging power of modern computer technology, ARRAYS tackles the even more pressing question of the ubiquity of computers – more precisely that of algorithms – in the creative process. ARRAYS started out as a live performance, in which we expressed ourselves using the very tools we were condemning. Musically, we created a piece that contended with our certainties. A piece in which we distilled our reflection, our concerns and displayed what we had relinquished.
This piece draws from various inspirations and materials : Charles de Gaulle’s 1960 statement that “The machine has taken power over the Earth”; some phonemes taken from Georges Aperghis’ composition “Machinations”; lines of code that seemed more poetic than functional; and even Robert Bresson’s, more philosophical, quote “See beings and things in their separate parts, isolate the parts, render them independent so as to give them a new dependence”. These reflections and fragments permeated our piece. We swallowed these words and “regurgitated” them here and there through a synthetic voice.
Through the scenography, we strived to show the different materials involved, the physical struggle we endure with the machine. They not only provide light for the play, but also forge a connection between sound and subject. After the “laptop music” trend and what acousmatic music offered the music world, we looked for the most fitting position for a live stage performance. The aim was to get out of the studio and find a physicality, a movement, a body that would move and command sound in real time.
A little over ten years after creating ARRAYS on stage, it still resonates as strongly in a world in which breakthroughs in AI (artificial intelligence) technology profoundly challenge artistic creative processes. In this context, we deemed important to revive this creation through an LP.
ARRAYS the play which premiered on the 1st April 2012 in Paris, was created 10 years before the play TESLA. It described the world to come; a world in which energy has endless uses, an era in which inventions make life easier and herald in the ultimate device: the computer.
After 1898, Nikola Tesla registered many patents for devices that used the “logic gate”, a stepping stone to the modern computer. He was ahead of his time and his intuition proved to be correct; but electric energy was only at the beginning of a long adventure. In the face of the surging power of modern computer technology, ARRAYS tackles the even more pressing question of the ubiquity of computers – more precisely that of algorithms – in the creative process. ARRAYS started out as a live performance, in which we expressed ourselves using the very tools we were condemning. Musically, we created a piece that contended with our certainties. A piece in which we distilled our reflection, our concerns and displayed what we had relinquished.
This piece draws from various inspirations and materials : Charles de Gaulle’s 1960 statement that “The machine has taken power over the Earth”; some phonemes taken from Georges Aperghis’ composition “Machinations”; lines of code that seemed more poetic than functional; and even Robert Bresson’s, more philosophical, quote “See beings and things in their separate parts, isolate the parts, render them independent so as to give them a new dependence”. These reflections and fragments permeated our piece. We swallowed these words and “regurgitated” them here and there through a synthetic voice.
Through the scenography, we strived to show the different materials involved, the physical struggle we endure with the machine. They not only provide light for the play, but also forge a connection between sound and subject. After the “laptop music” trend and what acousmatic music offered the music world, we looked for the most fitting position for a live stage performance. The aim was to get out of the studio and find a physicality, a movement, a body that would move and command sound in real time.
A little over ten years after creating ARRAYS on stage, it still resonates as strongly in a world in which breakthroughs in AI (artificial intelligence) technology profoundly challenge artistic creative processes. In this context, we deemed important to revive this creation through an LP.
HERVÉ BIROLINI / FRANÇOIS DONATO – SEPTEMBER 2023
ARRAYS @ MUSIQUE ACTION 2015 © JACKY JOANNES