Winter School 2022 – lectures & team
1 > Lectures / abstracts
Urban transports as sonic infrastructures of feeling: hearing, mapping, understanding.
Damien Masson
The daily experiences of urban transports bring into play tactile, body-to-body, breathing, sweating, sound, etc. More than visual and embodied, these pathic experiences invite us to propose renewed geographies of urban mobilities. This intervention proposes a theoretical and methodological reflection on an ordinary aesthetics of transport infrastructures which are considered as infrastructures of feeling. In doing so, we aim to comprehend their active role in the formation of sensitive experiences and affective atmospheres of ordinary mobilities.
To do so, this paper will use two research projects which aim at understanding collective emotions and embodied power relationship in Paris’ train and metro infrastructures. Firstly, the mobile and sensory methods that have been used to grasp the emotional, embodied, ethereal etc. at play will be presented. Secondly, we’ll develop a mapping attempt of some of the researched situations, which proposes to substitute time for space in order to highlight the importance of the temporal dimension in the expression of the lived situations. Lastly, we will propose an open reflection on the possibilities visual translation of more-than-representational phenomena its stakes and limitations.
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Micro-radio : formes et sociabilités des ondes radio
Julien Clauss
Plus vieux des nouveaux média, la radio a introduit dans la société un usage infus des champs électromagnétiques. De la TSF au DAB en passant par la FM, la nature invisible des ondes radio a conféré à ce média une aura singulière. Des installations explorant la physicalité des ondes radio aux dispositifs de micro radio participatifs, Julien Clauss présentera un panorama de projets artistiques qui convoquent plastiquement la radio.
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Workshops “Cartophonies”
Sylvie Laroche
In parallel to quantitative acoustic maps, a diversity of cartographic representations of the sound environment is developing. Among these, I will present the second version of the “cartophonies” tool (interface developed by the Cresson laboratory). From these examples, which present a better sharing of sound ambiences in time and space, I will explore the remarkable sound dimensions of a place.
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Virtual Echo, Propagation and Absorbsion Frontiers’fluidity and Dynamic Heterotopia
Annie Luciani
In this presentation, we examine the conjunction between (1) the mythologic concepts of auditory echo and reflection, (2) their extension to visible phenomenon, (3) a new digital technology and a new interactive art. We introduce a new concept, called “interactive simulated matter” allowing to render wide variety of echoes, reflections or more or less permanent absorbing effects in response of actions.
Such simulated phenomena enlarge the realistic ones – acoustical echo or optical mirroring – by creating intermediate situations of propagation, echoes and permanent or ephemeral absorbsions and engraving. The concept of interactive and dynamic simulated matter illustrates the concept of heterotopia with an intimate intertwining of space and time. Further, it explores, in visual arts, the notion of the frontiers, from clearly-cut limit to total evanescence, not only in terms of space but also in terms of time.
Fundamentally speaking, such questions address the question of the fluidity of the frontiers, not only in terms of space but also in terms of time. It is why we can speak here on “dynamic heterotopia” as a temporal point of view of the concept of heterotopia developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in social spaces.
We experienced such concept and technics in three artistic visual, musical and poetic creations with a software called GravDyn, for Dynamic Engraving, developed by ACROE:
– “EtOndes..Particules” (Image 1), designed and created by Kevin Sillam, scientific PhD researcher during his doctoral internship and Melanie Lesbats, young artist during her internship, working at ACROE with Annie Luciani.
– “Somnambule” (Image 2), designed and created by Kevin Sillam, scientific PhD researcher during his doctoral internship and Noé Guirand, young composer during his studies at Music Conservatory in Grenoble.
– “Wanderings” (Image 3), created and designed by Annie Luciani, who designed the software “Dynamic Engraving”, with visual animation and poems.
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The Soundscape of War
Lejla Odobašić Novo
The sound of an urban space is both performed by people as well as shaped by the natural and man-made aspects of the urban environment. Architectural planning seeks to create an acoustic equilibrium, taking into account the city’s natural geography. This is also the case for Sarajevo, a city that sits in a valley, with a carefully constructed acoustical equilibrium in its conception. During the four-year siege this acoustical equilibrium was unquestionably upturned. Through this research we examine the soundscape of war as experiences by fifteen witnesses that survived the siege of Sarajevo. We look at the acoustic implications on urban space and collective memory both during and after the war.
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Materiality and Audibility –
working with Deaf adolescents and sound
Dana Papachristou, Yorgos Samantas / TWIXTlab
In the framework of B-Air, TWIXTlab has been working with artists and with Deaf and hard-of-hearing children and their educators in their school setting, exploring alternative experiences with sound through artistic practice. In the presentation, we will reflect on our experience from the field, our methodology of approaching the classroom, and our future actions. Further, we will explore materiality as a valuable aid for alternative ways of listening and engaging the children with the sonic universe, as well as the spatial aspects of the educational/artistic process.
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Listening pieces / rooms
Gregoire Chelkoff
For several years we have experimented spatial devices at the scale of the moving body in different situations to create sound pieces / rooms. Designed through spatial notions as articulations, limits and inclusion, these devices can respond to certain issues in daily life, habitat or public space.The objective is to create spaces and situations through thethe through the sound experience sought, often on a small scale according to weak or not very important wall proximities and according to simple gestures of use. Once completed, the “listening pieces / rooms” will also solicit the other senses associated with the spatial experience: movement, tactility, luminosity, scents in order to question the sensory interactions and ambient qualities evoked or perceived in the installations produced. A brief overview of these experiences will show some exemples, the categories and the method used.
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Losonnante: a bone conduction listening device
Sébastien De Pertat & Thomas Bonnenfant
Losonnante is a bone conduction sound device that attempts to renew the approach to sound and listening in their relationship to living environments. Based on a micro digital audio system, the listening requires to rest the elbows on the device while resting the hands on ears. Thus, it offers an immersive experience that work on questions such as form, aesthetic, listening position, attention and sound content. This presentation will be a general introduction to this device and will question the way it could open up other ways of listening and being attentive to our living environment. In particular, we will speak about the listening of Knud Viktor’s oeuvre through this device. Knud Viktor was a Danish artist, a “sound painter” who spent a large part of his life composing from the micro-sounds from his environment.
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A journey through soundscapes heard by special ears
Soundwalk, soundscapes and composition
Sylvia Cucchi
People with special needs actively explore and make sense of their environment in a personal way. We need an approach to music and sound education that appeals to people with special needs to support making sense of everyday life. We present and discuss a individualized music education project with a woman with special needs experienced through soundwalks with the creation of a personal soundscape. The goal of the experience is to explore a mode of listening in which educators and special learners live and play out their own cultural experiences through sounds that coexist and interact. Unconventional notation in the setting represents a potential space where listening becomes shared creation and composition, starting form individual coding and decoding to produce and document new or imaginative collective responses.
Music education is often based on motor synchronization activities with an emphasis on sharing rhythm and time, but researchers have often found differences in individuals with disabilities ( e.g Autism Spectrum Disorders -ASD and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – ADHD) in the body-environment relationship through the sense of time, with the result that these individuals may experience loneliness in the music lesson.
Creative activities based on soundscape listening could facilitate the development of sound-based relationships, resulting in collective representation and potentially reducing any negative experiences in sharing musical activities.
Interactive Soundwalks and landscape perception through shared listening, by emphasizing the close relationship between music, culture, and identity, promote shared decision making, participatory bonding, and interaction with the environment and offer a fertile context for redefining the role of music education in the curriculum.
2 > biographies
Damien Masson
is an Associate Professor in Urban Studies at CY Cergy Paris University, researcher at the MRTE laboratory, France, and co-director of the International Ambiances Network. His previous research has focused on sonic ambiances of public transports, and on the relationship between ambiances and mobility. His current research concerns the ambient dimensions of security and safety policies in urban areas, and the atmospheres of “post-terror” in cities that experienced terrorist attacks. This involves developing new research methods that aim at crossing micro-spatial approach, social encounters, sensory phenomena and collective emotions. The contributions of his recent research consist in articulating the social, cultural and political dimensions of urban spaces to the sensory and the ambient.
Julien Clauss
Fouillant les reliques de ses études en mécanique des fluides et en thermodynamique, il oeuvre depuis 2001 dans le champ des arts et médias. Sa pratique s’inscrit dans le champ élargi de la sculpture. Orienté vers la fabrication d’espaces, son travail emprunte un vocabulaire concret parfois conceptuel ou minimal, l’environnement et les contextes du land art, et des expériences perceptuelles et immersives qui tendent vers une perte de repères. Il réalise des sculptures, des installations, des performances, des pièces sonores et des dispositifs
Sylvie Laroche
co-organisatrice de la 3ème édition de l’École d’Hiver, est docteure en architecture et actuellement chercheure associée au CRESSON. Elle est responsable technique du projet Cartophonies (www.cartophonies.fr). Ses thématiques de recherche portent sur les dimensions sensibles de la ville afin d’interroger les mutations des espaces urbains. Cette approche s’appuie sur des méthodes pluridisciplinaires originales, à la croisée de l’aménagement du territoire, des sciences humaines et sociales et des sciences pour l’ingénieur..
Annie Luciani
is a research engineer of the French Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, director of the ICA laboratory, for which she is responsible for the visual dynamics arts field. She co-manages the ACROE with Claude Cadoz.
She made scientific studies at the former electronic and radio-electricity school of Grenoble from 1969. She was already interested in artistic creation, especially to animated films.
Her research work began with computer animation, and more broadly with digital visual arts, in 1976 for the ACROE.
At the very begining of her work in 1976, she brought about the paradigm of physical modelling for animated images, which she was then one of the first to experiment. The mass-interaction concept that she found with her colleagues, resulted in many software realizations : modelling and simulation CORDIS-ANIMA, the first interactive modeler phisicaly based ANIMA to the today’s modeling, simulation and physcial visualisation software tools MIMESIS and Gravure Dynamique. She also introduced, at this same period, the concept of instrumental insteraction for visual arts, for which she developped with her colleagues technologies such as ERGOS gestural force feedback systems, real-time simulation and multisensory virtual reality platforms TELLURIS and ERGON X.
She supervised numerous thesis and research internships, on retroactive physical modelling for dynamic visual arts. She teaches a course, “Technolgies for dynamic visual arts” for the Art, Science, Technology master degree of Grenoble INP.
Lejla Odobašić Novo
is a Bosnian-Canadian architect and holds a professional license by the Ontario Association of Architects in Canada. She has over ten years of diverse professional experience in a number of renowned architectural practices both in Canada and internationally (including Toronto, London, Madrid, Rome and Istanbul). She is a regular member of Ontario Association of Architects and the Royal Canadian Institute of Architects. Currently she is also serving on the Steering Committee for AABH (Architectural Association in Bosnia and Herzegovina) and is a faculty member at the International Burch University Department of Architecture in Sarajevo. In 2018 she founded the Architecture Program within Kuma International Centre for the Arts in Sarajevo and has been appointed the program’s director in 2019.
Within the academic framework, Lejla has authored over twenty academic publications and two books. She has carried out a number of projects, exhibitions and other academic initiatives. Some of which include work with Liana Bresler on the project “Jerusalem-Sarajevo: In-between Cities” in 20010/11 (exhibited in Cambridge, Sarajevo, London, Opatija), DAAR Decolonizing Architecture residency in the West Bank in 2011 under Eyal Weizman, Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal (exhibited in New York, London and Neuchâtel),Tandem Western Balkans project in 2020 with Aleksadnar Obradović from Philopolitics entitled “(Re)making history: tracing politics in urban space” researching for similar pattern of historical revisionism that took place in Belgrade as well as in Sarajevo after 1991 through the renaming of streets, public spaces and monuments. Currently she is also the project leader for International Burch University in a Creative Europe Large sale Co-operation project “B-AIR” and is a BH representative in COST action 19131 (European Co-corporation in Science and Technology).
TWIXTlab
is a project space in Athens, situated between contemporary art, anthropology and everyday life. It is engaged in social research and theory, art research and production, education and social intervention. Since its establishment in 2014 it has organized, hosted, and participated in research projects, art events, exhibitions, screenings and discussions, while it has also provided educational and training modules, workshops and seminars for the wider public, on topics within its cross-disciplinary curriculum.
Dana Papachristou
is a musicologist and artist who focuses on the combination of arts through the use of new media. She has studied music (piano, clarinet, composition) at the Hellenic Conservatory, musicology at the Kapodistrian University of Athens, and Music Culture and Media in the departments of Media and Music Studies, leading to her dissertation, which looks into the “Relation of Music and Painting within Modernism Throughout the Correspondence of Schoenberg and Kandinsky.” She holds a PhD in the discipline of Philosophy of Art in regards to Deleuze and Guattari and her thesis was about “The Aesthetics of New Media Art through Capitalism and Schizophrenia: L’Anti-Oedipe and Mille Plateaux” at Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint-Denis and the Ionian University. In the recent years she has participated in interdisciplinary research projects about contemporary music and its relationship with other forms of art and in several music and geo-locative projects, and has worked as a musician in education. She is a founding member of Akoo.o collective. At the moment she is a lecturer in the department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries in the University of Thessaly and a visiting scholar at CalArts.
Yorgos Samantas
is a social anthropologist with a particular interest in listening and walking as cultural practices. He is using sound, walking, mapping, photography and video as means for experimentation for the broadening of anthropological research, expression and knowledge production. He has conducted research concerned with sound in youth urban cultures, with the senses, memory, and the urban experience, the environment, mental health, and contemporary art institutions, in Athens, Andros island and Manchester.
He has taken part in art events, residencies, exhibitions, and presentations in Greece and abroad, either solo or with his art group, akoo-o, and has worked as a sound engineer, sound designer and researcher in documentary films, a scientific advisor for the radio, art mediator, and a dj. He is a member of TWIXTlab, a project space situated between anthropology, contemporary art and everyday life.
Grégoire Chelkoff
Architecte de formation, il a participé à la création du CRESSON (centre de recherche sur l’espace sonore et l’environnement urbain) en 1979 à l’école d’architecture de Grenoble et aux recherches initiées par Jean-François Augoyard de 1980 à 1992 sur les effets sonores. Il a initié plusieurs travaux sur la dimension auditive dans ses relations avec l’espace construit et les pratiques, en espace public comme dans l’espace domestique et a entrepris l’expérimentation de « prototypes sonores architecturaux ». Il est responsable scientifique du site web cartophonies.fr. Professeur à l’ENSAG, ses recherches sur les ambiances architecturales et urbaines visent à développer une approche multisensorielle et expérimentale de l’architecture par l’étude des relations entre formes, formants sensibles et formalités des usages.
Sébastien De Pertat
is a PhD student in AAU-Cresson laboratory. His research focuses on sensitive approaches to the socio-ecological issues of the Anthropocene.
Thomas Bonnenfant
is an architect. He has participated in the Losonnante project as a continuation of his Fine Arts work on Solid-state listening stations
Sylvia Cucchi
Ph.D in music neuroscience, classical and jazz pianist and researcher and teacher in pedagogy, cognitive psychology and neuroscience of music.
Silvia Cucchi graduated with honors in classical piano, jazz, jazz composition at the Conservatory of Turin and graduated in music pedagogy in Germany.
She teaches Music Pedagogy and Psychology for Music Didactics at the Ghedini Conservatory of Cuneo.
She optained postgraduate degree at the International Piano Academy Incontri col Maestro in Imola followed by Maestro Franco Scala and at Hochschule für Musik in Köln and in Jazz Piano under the guidance of Maestro John Taylor, master degrees in in Music Therapy. Statistical Data Analysis, Neurobiology, Dietetics and Special Pedagogy.
As a lecturer , she collaborates with MIUR (the Ministry of Education in Italy), and with several italian Universities. She works as pianist at several national theaters, as accompanist and soloist. She has obtained several awards and special prizes both as a classical and jazz pianist, being the winner of more than 30 national and international piano competitions.
Among the publications of which she is author, there are eight CDs with original piano compositions, two soundtracks, one of which was commissioned by the Piedmont Region, a book about the musical brain published by Lilium Edition for the Italian Orff Schulwerk and numerous articles in international journals, among which the prestigious journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Her research topics of interest are musical cognition with particular regard to the and relationships between musical expertise and multisensory perception of space and the neuorphysiological and biomolecular correlates of intracellular communication via mechanical vibrations, post stroke neurocognitive rehabilitation of movement, and statistical approaches for the validation of rating scales.
Nicolas Tixier
is an architect, DR and HDR. He is a Professor of theory and design at The National School of Architecture of Grenoble and also teaches at the Annecy Alpes School of Fine Arts and the Grenoble Institute of Urbanism. He is a researcher at the CRESSON Laboratory (UMR AAU) and a member of the International Ambiances Network. He is a founding member of the BazarUrbain collective. Since 2009, he has been president of the Grenoble Cinematheque. Since 2018, he has been director of the CRESSON and deputy director of the UMR Ambiances, Architectures, Urbanities.
Cet événement est financé par le projet “B-AIR Art Infinity Radio“, l’un des projets lauréats de l’appel européen du programme Culture de l’Agence européenne pour la culture, l’éducation et la création (EACEA).
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