[ISEA98] Artist Statement: Robin Rimbaud (scanner) – stopstarting

Artist Statement

Robin Rimbaud aka scanner conceived stopstarting whilst working in Liverpool during 1998 as a Visiting Fellow at Liverpool Art School, John Moores Univerity. Having recorded various spaces and locations in the city these were then processed in the studio in Liverpool and are here mixed into live scanned telephonic voices from the aether, radio waves and other indiscriminate signals pulled down from the skies to produce a temporary live sound polaroid of the acoustic data found in Liverpool.
Robin Rimbaud, with his work as scanner, implicates himself in processes of surveillance, engendering access to both technology and language and the power games of voyeurism. Dubbed a ‘telephone terrorist’, Rimbaud is a techno-data pirate whose scavenging of the electronic communications highways provides the raw materials for his aural collages of electronic music and ‘found’ conversations. Musician, writer, media critic, cultural engineer, and host of the monthly digital club the Electronic Lounge at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London since 1994, ‘a meaningful nexus of interaction’, (The Independent), he is currently at work on a variety of projects.
In 1996 he completed a lecture tour of Australia at the invitation of ANAT (Australian Network for Art & Technology), performed and worked all around Europe, was commissioned by the Centre of Choreography in France to compose the soundtrack to two ballets at the Paris Opera House, curated a series of sound related events in Utrecht and Europe and was last sighted recording and working with Laurie Anderson and Brian Ferry in a secret bunker. His most recent release is a CD sound portrait of the late UK film director Derek Jarman.

  • Robin Rimbaud aka scanner, Visiting Fellow in Sound, Liverpool Art School. John Moores University, UK