Artists Statement

Interactive installation, 2013. Sound Sculpture on wood / Interactive marquetry

“Matière sensible | Sensitive matter” is a sculpture made of very thin and delicate wood veneer sheet. Here the artists use ash wood. These sheet of wood has distinct sonorous touch zones that follow the natural veins of wood. The researches of Scenocosme have enabled them to develop an artistic and technical process invisible and delicate. A meticulous and invisible design work gives them the ability to define a musical score spread over different areas of the wood. They have invented this process that they call «interactive marquetry». This wood sculpture produces sounds when the spectators touch them. They use sounds to stimulate haptic and gestural behaviour. Thus, the design of these sculpture looks like instruments which reveal by the touch various kind of sounds.
Since many years, Scenocosme’s artists invent interactive works through a singular process of hybridizations between natural elements and technology. They create symbolic and sensorial relationships between the body and the environment natural or social. This wood sculpture offers a sensory and intimate relationship between the wood and the body of the viewer by revealing a sound memory in physical contact with the matter. The electrostatic energy of the human body is the trigger for this artwork. Interactive zones follow exactly the veins of wood.
Scenocosme has developped a sensitivity and a unique reactivity of the wood material, thus providing a new sensory interaction in the continuity of their artistic hybridizations between nature and technology. They have developed an original marquetry process with the material wood which is invisible, transparent, and sensitive. This approach follows their intent to create interactive, sensory artworks that enhance extra ordinary relationships with natural elements in which the technology disappears. As media artists, they explore capacities of technologies in order to draw sensitive relationships through specific stagings where senses are augmented. Their works came from possible hybridizations between the living world and technology which meeting points incite them to invent sensitive and poetic languages.They suggest to sound out, to feel elements of reality which are invisible or to whom we are insensitive.
They use the idea of the cloud as a metaphor of the invisible. Because it has an unpredictable form, it is in indeterminate metamorphosis, and his process escapes to our perception. Various natural and artificial clouds surround us (climatic, biological, energetic or electromagnetic). Through their artworks, they evoke invisible energetic clouds (electrostatic) which follow living beings like unpredictable shadows. Sometimes, these clouds cross together and exchange some information. In a poetic way, they interpret these invisible links through sonorous and visual stagings. Then, when they imagine the energetic clouds of living beings, the limits of the body become permeable, and with their technology , in a way they design extraordinary relationships, between humans, and between humans and environment too. Interactions they offer in their works make invisible exchanges sensitive. Rather than revealing clearly their complexity, they open everyone’s imagination. Between the reality and our perception, there is always a «blind point» which stimulates the imagination.
When they create interactive works, Scenocosme invent sonorous or/and visual languages. They translate the exchanges between living beings and between the body and its environment. They suggest interrelations where invisible becomes perceptible. Materialized, our sensations are augmented. Through a poetic interpretation of invisible mechanisms, technologies allow them to draw sensory relationships, and to generate unpredictable living interactions. Their hybrid artworks play with their own augmented senses. They live with technology and have reactions which escape deliberately to their control.

• Grégory Lasserre and AnaÏs met den Ancxt work together under the name SCENOCOSME. They live in France. Their singular artworks use diverse expressions: interactive installations, visual art, digital art, sound art, collective performances etc…. They explore digital technology in order to find substances of dreams, poetries, sensitivities and delicacies. They overturn various technologies in order to create contemporary artworks and to draw sensitive relationships through specific stagings where senses are augmented. Their works came from possible hybridizations between the living world and technology which meeting points incite them to invent sensitive and poetic languages. Their artistic process is characterised by the introduction of natural elements in their technological art installation, like plants, stones, water, wood, human body. They are also interested by the living bodies and the influences of energy as sources of sensitive interactions like electrostatic energy and heat. They also explore invisible relationships with our environment: they can feel energetic variations of living beings. They design interactive artworks, and choregraphic collective performances, in which spectators share extraordinary sensory experiences.  scenocosme.com

Full text and photo (PDF) p. 248-250