Taipei - Bornéo
The Insomnia Sketchbook
This insomnia sketchbook is an installation imagined by the Taiwanese collective LuxuryLogico with Andrea Cera for the electronics. Symbolizing flashes of consciousness, states between wakefulness and sleep, auditory hallucinations, balls of light draw paths in the darkness. The immaterial is carried by a very material, motorized structure. This engineering challenge is matched by the compositional challenge: to imagine a music of affects - aggressions and reactions, rage, fear or depression in which the installation's poetry, without a human component, manifests itself. To listen—with eyes wide open—to what the light reveals, little by little, of the machinery: a theater of attention and tension.
Sonic and visual performance - French Premiere
Collectif LuxuryLogico and Andrea Cera
Thomas Goepfer computer music design IRCAM
Clément Cerles Sound diffusion IRCAM
With the support of Centre culturel de Taïwan à Paris, Ministry of Culture Taiwan (R.O.C.).
Paleoscapes - Borneo 2023
Tropical rainforest host the highest species richness of any other biome on Earth. Within this megadiverse community, equatorial lowland forests that have remained primary (untouched historically and currently undisturbed) have been selected as target areas to investigate the paleo-choirs of ecosystems. Fragments of Extinction is an interdisciplinary long-term project which from 1998 is recording and revealing ecoacoustic data collected in the remaining areas of intact equatorial forest in Southeast Asia, Amazon and Africa. Through advanced 3-dimensional recording technologies, employed for the first time in these remote and extreme environments, the project is building an archive of entire circadian cycles. These 24-hour spherical sound portraits are analysed and presented to audiences through sensorial and cognitive time-lapse experiences, to foster awareness about the extinction crisis and the urgency of heritagization of the last refuges of biodiversity, which high systemic integrity is surprisingly clear in their balanced, but vanishing, soundscape. In order to experiment and to expose audiences to the intangible properties of these unique polyphonies, Sonosfera® has been engineered and built: a 60-seat mobile eco-acoustic amphitheatre which, through 45 loudspeakers perfectly positioned in spherical geometry and specific internal acoustics, enables the acoustic reconstruction and visualization of complex 3D sound habitats. Can these technology-mediated deep-listening experiences of primal soundscapes heal our senses and reduce the gap that disconnects us from the natural world? Can these help the intimate leap of consciousness of individuals toward one of the most urgent and unavoidable issues of our times: the ecological transition?
The work “Paleoscapes – Borneo-2023” created for IRCAM Forum 2023, and premiering in the world’s unique venue of Espace the Projection, is a further step for the long-term project and represents internationally one of the first attempts of its kind. These new 3D field recordings in Borneo were in fact collected (in coll. with mh acoustics) with a new 64-capsule microphone array capable of generating ‘native’ 6th-order Ambisonics spherical harmonics.
“Paleoscapes – Borneo-2023” focuses on an impressive single pure recording, collected in the last expedition in a remote forest of north-east Borneo. In this section at dusk (starting around 6pm), excerpted from one of the 24-hour original continuous 900-GB recordings, the coordinated and interdependent sonic niches and circadian revolution of birds, amphibians and paleotropical insects is the result of the oldest known evolutionary processes of any other forest ecosystem on Earth.
It has been chosen to present the recording in its unaltered state, to open a door into its natural complex organization and equilibrium. Its sound may speak to us about its relevance for 21st century music aesthetics.
David Monacchi Paleoscapes - Borneo 2023 - Premiere 2023
