Artist Statement

Exhibition at 36 degrés and Galerie Charlot, June 6 – 18

Generative & Interactive Sound Installation
400 x 160 x 180 centimeters

Connected to sensors making it possible to broaden the threshold of human perception, the receiver of a needle telegraph reacts to variations drawn from its immediate environment. This approach consists of training artificial intelligence to analyze imperceptible phenomena – the evolution of electromagnetic waves present in space in different forms – in order to detect meaning: words, words, sentences, etc.

Sitting in front of this device, the spectator is first invited to listen to the sound produced by this strange machine, which transposes the flow studied by the neural network into audible frequencies: a sort of fluctuating white noise, whose modulations sometimes resemble to the formants of the voice. When occurrences are found by the voice recognition program, the telegraph activates to transmit these messages from the invisible – whether they are understandable or not. All machine activity is recorded in a logbook which traces the history of the information deciphered by the neural network.

Thanks to a capture system which filters the audio signal to isolate the dominant frequencies, the visitor can interact with the work and contribute their presence in this quest for something beyond – a way of paying attention on what normally escapes.

If we seem prisoners of the illusion of a single world, this installation attempts to reveal the imagination of other possible worlds, parallel or underlying this one, by relying on the technological promises of the future to propose a new reading of the present.

Design and Production: Véronique Béland
Computer Programming – Sound Processing & Interactivity: Alexandre Burton
Computer Programming – Deep Learning: Léo Dubus
Design Sensors & Telegraph Mechanization: FabLab Les Usines
Drawing Scenography Plans: Sophie Laroche
Scenography Coordination: FabLab Factories
Ironwork: Strukenfer

https://veroniquebeland.art/haunted-telegraph

• Originally from Quebec (Canada), Véronique Béland has lived in France since 2010, where she graduated from the Studio national des arts contemporains Le Fresnoy in 2012. She also holds a master’s degree in visual and media arts from the University of Quebec to Montreal. Her artistic practice, which gravitates between media arts and literature, is interested in elusive phenomena on a human scale, in a constant attempt to auscultate what seems empty to reveal its content. Through various translation or transcoding protocols, which summon both the worlds of art and science while maintaining a close link with the notion of archiving, her works seek to make contact between the perceptible and the imperceptible, from which a certain form of narration emerges.

A delegated production Association AY128 – Les Usines, produced in co-production with Avatar, Le Lieu Multiple / Espace Mendès-France Poitiers and the Chroniques platform, supported by the Regional Council of the South Region and the City of Marseille and the French Institute in Paris , coordinated by Première Nature and ZINC. A project supported by the plastic and visual arts sector contract in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (Ministry of Culture, Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region and Astre Network). With the support of the CCSTI – Neo-Aquitaine Network of Scientific Culture.