Relationship with the tool

The relationship between the performer, the tool and the works

Sometimes I have the remark or the insinuation when performing that we see more the demonstration of a tool than the creation of a real work ?

In a way, they consider that the tool is just a means to create the final objective, the finished, fixed composition, or maybe that the performance realised is just a demonstration showing all the possibilities of the tool to impress, where they did not feel any kind of real affect or expression, which may be sometimes due to my limited time of preparation, training in studio or rare representations in concert.

But this remark is typical of an “acousmatic composer“ of fixed works, who thinks above all about the final work and has no regard for “mere tools“, using any to achieve his fixed goal. For traditional composers, works and tools are two distinct things. But for an improviser, the relationship to the tool or instrument, especially when he has been developing it personally for years and playing with it, and even if is not visible to the audience, is just as important as the “unfinished, changing work“, which is constantly evolving with the improviser (see reference to Friedrich Hölderlin in Spatial improvisation).

For me, the work, the creator and the tool have become inseparable. The tool is part of the creation and is my partner to play and perform. It has “sadly“ become as one of the only or unique rare members of my “family“, who will always be and stay with me.

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Some words about my first presentation in english in a conference :

As I said in 2018 during the ICMC conference in Daegu, South Korea, to present my first article in english :

“Live 4 Life is not only a tool, but also an approach that implies to limit myself to one open source tool, trying to encourage DIY, that can be shared with everyone“ (a kind of ecological approach in terms of tools). In spite of this minimalism in terms of the tool used, there is a maximalist approach with regards to the multitude of sounds used and their density.

“I do not want to use tools from the market (even if it might sound stupid and a limiting approach), where I have to adapt myself to a tool. That's why I decided to build my own application tailored to my needs and dreams to realise spatial improvisations. I hope this tool will follow me all my life, even though I am (sometimes or often) a little bit tired of this project, since I'm working with it for several years.“

“This relationship with this tool is a little bit like the relationship with a human partner, a lover. You try to stick to a person all your life. Sometimes, you love it, sometimes you hate it. But you never abandon. You try to stick to it, take the time in order to dig and explore more with one thing. As with humans, I do not want to do zapping and try all the tools available.“ It is an “old-style“ approach, that most new generations might never understand in my living time.

“It is really an experimental and utopian project, trying to bring the computer closer to a human partner, with which you plan events, and try to realise and create incredible moments. You develop, experiment, improvise and play.“

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A lifetime project

Live 4 Life and its documentation with this wiki has become for a life project. Even if there are some differences, it has many similitudes with the spirit of the performer Steven Cohen, especially about his project Boudoir in terms of maximalism in duration and accumulation of everything and its limits, when he says : “I’ve been working on it for so long that I’ve almost lost the sense of why I am doing it. […] It is almost unworkable trying to incorporate performance into installation to visual art, plastic video. This (work) was intended as an accumulation of everything I have collected in my life, put it in a single space, and also trying to say everything that have happened in my life in a single work. But, none of that is going to happen. […] It is interesting because everything I ever wanted was a lot of everything. But I came to realise that it’s not what you need in making good art. In fact, endless resources can be an impediment to saying what you need to say. There’s a whole of everything and not enough something. Almost not enough me. Because I thought it was the last work I’ll ever make, I wanted to make it bigger, better, braver, fuller, more fabulous than ever. But, it is any of those things. I also haven’t started, so I don’t know what it is, or how it will work or where it worked.“ In this desire to accumulate and overfill with a lot of details, it's for me not so much a question of occupying space or imposing, but of giving a sense of the multiplicity that exists within each person.

As Louis Blériot wrote, just a few days before his exploit of crossing the English Channel with his Blériot 11 prototype, I could have expressed something similar in relation to tool-building and perseverance over time : “I've built number 11, probably the last one, I've built it with all the fervor that shipwrecked men put into tying together the planks of their raft; this aircraft/machine is everything to me and I'm going to ask it for everything.“ As Catherine Maunoury puts it : “We can talk about the relationship between passion and patience, which have the same Greek root, meaning: to feel, to experience. When you have a passion, if you stop without delving deeper, you don't stand a chance. You can have patience for nothing, but without patience, no passion can develop. Passion needs to be constantly transformed, to get the best out of it every time.“

A project in the form of Art Brut ?

The Live 4 life project can be considered as a form of art brut, also called outsider art, art of the insane or singular art, in the field of sound and the creation of digital tools in its primitive, infantile and obsessive form. The project approaches art brut in certain aspects and moves away from it by considering others.

It comes close in the sense that what is important is the process, the energy of creation with the compelling need to do it. The conservation of works outside the place and the moment (hic and nunc) and life is of no importance. This project was a refuge from this world, from the madness and the traumas that had triggered it. It was thus an attempt to build me an inhabitable world, to escape the boredom and hardness of life in solitude. It started at a time when I was not going well in my life (it hasn't changed much and won't get better until I have a lover in my life), where I tried to fill a pain. It offers an individual aesthetic, not a story of categories, but a story of individuals, the pursuit of my own personal vision. Art brut can be considered as the place par excellence of perdition, where one gets lost to find a refuge in life ?

Unlike art brut, this project moves away from it in the sense that it also aims to communicate with the world, to bring me closer to others through the game of seduction and to try to make myself a little loved by others. It also moves away from it in his speech and his transmission : although it was initiated in a self-taught way thanks to the help of online community, I am more or less close to the harmful influence of the academic culture, in which I bathed. It is also both outside the corrupting power of the market, although it is forced to bathe within it. Finally, it is not raw in the sense that I take up and rework my creations over time, which often come from other artists or thinkers.

Like the artist Aloïse Corbaz, one of Dubuffet's favorite artists in art brut, who often represents couples kissing, who almost evokes a single face, like a fusion, my creative energy often starts from this same representation, ideal, idealised or fantasised.

Like the artist Jill Gallieni, through creation, I take stock of life and my relationship with others and this project ultimately constitutes prayers : “it's not just my little world, it starts with a prayer for me, for the people I love very much afterwards, but it extends to a prayer for the world.“

Like Julius Bockelt, who draws the vibrations of ephemeral clouds and the cosmos in a magnificent way, I try to draw air / sound vibrations in space.