films & videos

FR - ENG

Through video, Valentin Sismann develops a body of work articulated around a reflection on media and writing on support. Each work is the construction of a new system and its syntax. It's a continuation of his musical thinking, inextricably linked to a play with the technological orthoses of memory: recording media.

Desktopsongs is a cycle of video pieces questioning our relationship with technology. Each work, inspired by desktop movie practice, is a musical system dependent on a visual process. The cycle includes Screensong, questioning data collection related to privacy, Simonsong, questioning technological hegemony in the world of contemporary music, and Playpausesong, questioning mass media consumption.

Musical language is more semiological than semantic; it skips words and meanings to manipulate large images in a certain kind of temporal poetry. Fixed media writing in the Schaefferian sense of musique concrète concentrates this idea, since by being fixed and reflexive, it is nothing but language. In this sense, my idea of music is not more audio than visual, but is quite simply media, recording media.

I find that there's a certain compositional determinism linked to our way of conceiving sound; morphology, spectromorphology or anecdotism, as examples, easily lead to music that's limited to these conceptions. I don't think it's impossible to renew our own musical language, but I do think that for me, video is an opportunity to establish a system specific to each work.