biography
FR - ENG
Valentin Sismann is a French acousmatic music composer and video artist. After making the film In Repetito Religare with Audrey Colard, he decided to combine electroacoustic and video art in his practice. His work has been shown in over twenty countries in group exhibitions, screenings and concerts. In 2024, he won the DJTAL Humain prize for his video Screensong and the petites formes prize for his acousmatic piece Loinaître.
He studied electroacoustic composition mainly with Marco Marini at the CRD of Pantin, and mixed and multimedia composition with Santiago Diez-Fisher as well as Jérome Combier at the University of Paris VIII. He also studied acousmatic interpretation with Jonathan Prager and then with Annette Vande Gorne at Musiques & Recherches. Alongside his musical studies, he completed his degree in sound engineering at the Ecole Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle in Paris.
Valentin
Sismann's work revolves around a reflection on recording media and
their writing possibilities. In his works, whether acousmatic or
video, he seeks to develop a language related to these time-based
media,
a temporal writing invoking poetry, humor and musicality. In his
acousmatic works, he often questions the boundary between the
anecdotic and the abstract, the recorded and the composed. He plays
on the sometimes poetic, sometimes harsh transition from one of these
worlds to the other, in dialogues of spaces, in a language as
narrative as it is musical. His video works, though more critical, are a continuation of his musical thinking. While inspired by electroacoustic composition
processes, the aim of each work is often the construction of a new
musical device, made possible by the video medium.
Today, he wishes to devote himself to teaching. While continuing to compose, he is studying to become a teacher himself. His current work focuses on the construction of three cycles: Espaces Amoureux, a series of acousmatic pieces about space and heart; Cycle des songes, where multichannel compositions and ghosts intermingle; and Desktopsongs, a suite of video pieces questioning our relationships to technologies.
[ works catalogue ]
