ding TN ENG PRESENT

The Travelling Natures platform project is an artistic project traveler and contextual. It articulates around a series of actions, productions and broadcastings/distributions which will take into account the contexts of the various territories where we shall live on the Island of Java and Bali in Indonesia and in France, in Labège, in Saint-Denis and in Pau and its neighborhood. It will end in the realization of a multimedia environment and an interactive device associating the sound and the video as well as plastic and graphic forms.

It will be at first about residence, to sound the psyche and the memory of a community. For it, we shall begin a work of exchanges with the inhabitants of the various territories under the shape of observations and meetings : we shall establish a collection of recorded and filmed objects. Various information will be gleaned with the inhabitants, of the order of the memory/souvenir, of the feeling of being membership in a community, the projection of one in the future. We shall also study the forms of collective rites inherent to each of the communities. Secondly we shall work from these collections and studies to work out protocols of collective creation which we shall activate in the continuation with the voluntary inhabitants. From there birth singular objects which will be implemented in the device of "Travelling Natures" exhibition.

During these time, of residence we shall also realize the sound mapping/cartography of each territory by leaning on existing graphic data but also from concrete data which we shall take in public places and deprived of the human communities that they are urban or rural. For example, in the public place we shall get sounds produced by the architectural structures, networks of traffic, the places of gatherings etc.

In every movement of the exhibition, the sound mappings are added to the others. They constitute the base of an interactive application practised by the public.
In the exhibition, the sound cartography determines a sensitive and opened space of data. It will be crossed as a territory by the spectactors* who, according to the wanderings, will draw and will play singular sound trajectories. These sound trajectories will be directly broadcasted in audio headsets worn by every spectactor and memorized by the device. They appear as variable sound partitions and will form the palimpsests of an unstable and travelling mapping/cartography.

* spectactors (spectacteur in french) : The word spectactor is a suitcase word contracting the word spectator and the word actor. The spectactor is a spectator-actor of the interactive work … (Réjean Dumouchel: the spectacteur and the contactile-In "La revue Cinemas")

Labège : "Maison Salvan" Toulouse Sud / Résidence et exposition (août 2011 à octobre 2012).

Saint-Denis : M.S.H. et C.I.C.M. Paris Nord / Résidence de recherche, journée d'étude.

Saint-Denis : Synesthésie / Résidence, exposition.

Région paloise : "Le Bel Ordinaire" Billère / Résidence et exposition (2012 à 2014).

Pau : École supérieur d’art de. Pau-Pyrénées / Mise en place d’un programme d’échanges internationaux pour des étudiants français et indonésiens.

Le projet reçoit le soutien financier du Conseil Régional d’Aquitaine dans le cadre de son programme d’aide à la mobilité des artistes.

H.O.N.F., Home of Natural Fiber, à Yogjakarta.

Yogyakarta Art Media Festival.

Institut Français de Yogyakarta ( IFI LIP )

L’Université des arts de Yogyakarta (ISI)

The sound cartography of the project Travelling Natures is an unstable map, conceived on the principle of the "rhizome" which Gilles Deleuze exposes in " One thousand Trays "/"Mille Plateaux". It is the territory which takes the shape of a sound railing where every point is connected with every other point, and allows an infinite movement of the spectacteur in spaces of data. The sound railing is " acentrée ", the place of exposure, seat of reception of the device is virtually mobile. The map is crossed by base lines the sound trajectories of which are the individuals walkers. The modelling of the sound bar in mapping/cartography is not a copy but another card. Every interaction with a spectacteur redefines a new map.

Au niveau de la conceptualisation et de la réalisation du projet ainsi que lors de son approche scientifique, un ensemble de coopérations ponctueront les temps de résidence sous la forme de conférences et d’interventions performatives. Ces contributions donneront lieux également à la capitalisation de ressources éditoriales en vu du projet d'édition Travelling Natures.

L’idée est donc d’organiser une série de temps forts qui ponctueront le projet Travelling Natures sur le lieu des résidences.

Benoît Courribet, musicien, ingénieur et théoricien, doctorant à la faculté de St Denis : Conférence sur la question de « la modélisation du son ».

Lyn Nékorimaté, artiste, plasticienne sonore et musicienne : Production d’un concert ou/et d’une diffusion sonore de sa dernière création.

Jean-Paul Labro, artiste, plasticien, vidéaste, performeur : Conférence sur son travail et/ou performance, participera à la journée d'étude sur "Art et Territoire" organisée par la M.S.H. en décembre 2011 à St Denis.

Plusieurs associations artistiques et scientifiques sont envisagées (liste non exhaustive) :

Evelyne Toussaint, théoricienne des arts, enseignante chercheur à l’UPPA (Pau) : Conférence sur les thèmes du laboratoire qu’elle co-dirige : ITEM (Identité Territoires, Expressions, Mobilités).

Thierry Guibert, artiste et théoricien, doctorant à l’UCAM de Montréal : Conférence sur le thème de « Effets de présence, les formes d’interactivité relevées dans l’art numérique ».

Hélène Douence, Géographe, enseignante chercheur à l’UPPA (Pau) : Conférence sur un des thèmes de sa recherche : « Le paysage est entendu comme un objet de médiation entre l’expérience individuelle d’être au monde et une construction collective qui fait société ».

Les membres du collectif d’artistes HONF : House of Natural Fiber, new media art laboratory basé à Yogyakarta, Indonésie / invité à travailler dans le cadre d’un workshop et d’une exposition.
www.natural-fiber.com/

Ferial Affif, Directrice de IVAA/Indonesian Visual Art Archive à Jogjakarta, invité dans le cadre d’une journée d’étude.
http://www.ivaa-online.org

Travelling Natures is a "fictional" space of condensation.

On the scale of an urban structure, the community establishes through a memory and through a common heritage, as well as by a care towards symbolic and rational of the territory.
We are interested in the device of representation of communities when it escapes the Institutions which legitimize the patrimonial capital. It is the peculiarity of the inhabitants that we address to bring to the foreground the subjective dimension of a community. According to Hélène Douence* " its establishes on a sum of " auto-representations " singular which converge by the circuits of the community if these flows are activated in the mental and intimate space of every individual who composes the community ".

One of the stakes in Travelling Natures platform is to bring to the foreground the dimensions imaginary and fantasized over a community. When it is outlined in the present, it is in the weft of intersubjective exchanges that remains porous in the incidences of a contingent, social reality, and political … It is also this relationship in its exteriority which we want to investigate.
If our work consists in making these flows of auto-representations converge in a work the first data of which are cartographic, it is that there is in this principle of representation of the territory a possible reading of the community as social and artistic work. We can make reference here to the alive monuments of Jochen Gerz as social sculpture.
It will be a question for us of building with the French and Indonesian communities a hybrid collective entity, based on the experience of a collective unconscious aroused by an alive and performative relationship in the reality.

TRAVELLING NATURES is a project of digital art connected to the representations of the territory and the communities which live there. Based on a principle of sound mapping/cartography, the project will take the shape of a multimedia device, at the same time nomadic and opened. It will integrate a sum of sound and videographic data collected during the various migrations of the project.

TRAVELLING NATURES platform includes a forward-looking approach with the populations stemming from different territorial and cultural contexts. Thanks to several already acquired partnerships, the project will build itself around cycles of residences and around exhibitions in France, to Labège, Saint-Denis, in the paloise conglomeration, in Indonesia, on the Java Island.

TRAVELLING NATURES is worn by a multidisciplinary team consisted of Jean-Paul Labro, artist, video director, Lyn Nékorimaté artist and plastic sound designer, Benoît Courribet, musician and researcher in the center of research in Computing and of musical Creation at the University of Paris VIII ( C.I.C.M) punctually, we shall appeal to the other artistic and scientific collaborations in particular in the field of the human sciences …

Diverse artistic and ritual practices stemming from Java and Bali will be studied and interpreted in our propositions as the use of Balinese masks, the shadow theater ( the wayang kulit ), the musical performance of Gamelan and the voice of Dalang …
We are particularly interested in the interpretative and poetic strength of the reality of the Javanese culture. It is through their rites that these cultures, stemming from an animistic spirituality, give to the invisible world a central and diffuse place which gives rhythm to the everyday life.
It is this porosity which stimulated our attention. Indeed, spirits and ghosts are not secondary inhabitants but live with the alive which non-stop have to negotiate with them to channel the natural strengths of the reality. The question of an invisible, sometimes dreaded and honored world is to link with the place that the peoples Balinese and Javanese in the visible world give themselves.
People are bound with elements and with cycles of the nature, they are in the world and cross it as vital flow, impermanent and short-lived. To calm forces of Nature, it is necessary to participate in the energy of its cycles by building with the presence of the devils and the ghosts a reality which is divided, in the structures of the housing environment, in the social life, and in the artistic forms as the theater, the music …

Which real share the community of Labège? Which devils and ghosts lives in Saint-Denis?... How to represent them? Which temple could we build for them to pay them tribute and calm them? So many questions which will question our contemporary problems about the thought of our social and political space and as its representations …

To elaborate our device of representation of territories and communities, we plan to work from a study of the collective rites come from French and Indonesian vernacular cultures. The study of these rites will give rise to an artistic reappropriation under the shape of creative protocols proposed to the inhabitants. These protocols will give places to performative actions, and filmed and registered scenarios which can update mythologies and local fictions... This collaboration led with the inhabitants will produce hybrid plastic, sound and visual forms which will establish one of the materials of the project Travelling Natures.

This device of representation is elaborated from a principle of exchange of imagination between Indonesia and France. It seeks the collective unconscious of a community from a process of déterritorialisation of its own cultural heritage. The Balinese and Javanese rites will introduce creations in France and vice versa.

• The spectactor body, in an immersif relationship with the image, as the one of a cartography in relief and in curves of levels.

• The architectural spectre of the place and the body of spectactors in the device.

So, by proceeding, we wish to create a set of new synaesthesia between the sound representation and the visual one. The passage of the one into the other dimension will allow us to work on the ghost presence of the body and its possible obstinacy in the collective memory (here, a plastic and sound memory). Indeed spectactors, at the same time as they will act as the composers of their own sound mappings, will be modelled and represented in real time on screens as spectral entities. They will be memorized by the computer and will form a perceptible community in the temporality of the exhibition, reappearing as subjects of the alive memory of the place.

The sound cartography of Labège is drawn according to its own geography but also according to its subjective dimension which is connected to the imagination of the inhabitants.

If the Maison Salvan is situated in a fixed place of the map of Labège, the device of the project allows the virtual mobility of the Maison Salvan. The drawing of the architectural block of the Maison Salvan operates as a cursor, a sound reading/play-back head which moves on the map of Labège. Every new place of the " Maison Salvan Block " on the map determine the outlines of a fragment of the sound mapping. The movements of the " Block : Maison Salvan " can be commanded by the spectactor which can escape the architectural block of the Maison Salvan and move from a point to the other one outside of the place of the exhibition.

The sound cartography will be the object of a visual modelling * (1) broadcast in live in the space of exhibition by videos projections.

In the exhibition of "Travelling Natures" platform project several types of textual, graphic, videographic, photographic and sound autonomous objects will be gathered in a related way in the device of the interactive mapping/cartography.

The digital technologies have for characteristic to supply a representation of every types of contents (numbers, characters, texts, images, sounds, videos) under the shape of series of numbers (MIDI system supported by the Max MSP interface will establish a part of the used tools).
So, it is possible to operate in natural changes of these data and, for example, to interpret any digital contents as a sound signal. We can give to hear a topographic account, the image of a landscape … We speak then of about " sonification ". We can also "hide" data by inserting them into a digital flow of various nature, this process is called " stéganographie " and will allow "to hide" the recording of a conversation in the relief of a landscape of synthesis …

The whole meditative sound corpus andor generated by the technics described previously can then be ordered in real time according to rules taking into account the movements of the visitors of the on-site installation at the Maison Salvan. Technics of capture of movement will allow a simultaneous navigation in a virtual space in which the visitor will live and will interact with sound entities according to its movements (behavior of leak or attraction...).