video

FR - ENG

Through video, Valentin Sismann develops a body of work based on reflections on media, music and fixed media writing . Inspired by the processes of electroacoustic composition, these works tend towards the construction of new devices. It's a continuation of his musical thinking, inextricably linked to a play with the technological orthoses of memory: recording media. His major cycle of video works - entitled Desktopsongs - illustrates all these preoccupations, while other works such as Plasformes and Autoportrait also have pictorial stakes, in the manner of moving paintings.

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, tending towards an economy of the device. The cycle includes Screensong, questioning data privacy, Simonsong, questioning technological hegemony in the world of contemporary music, Playpausesong, questioning mass media consumption, and Playersong, questioning the mediatization of weapons over the Internet.

Musical language is more semiotic than semantic; it dispenses with words and, above all, meaning, in order to manipulate vast images resulting in a certain kind of temporal poetry. Fixed media writing - in the sense of Schaefferian musique concrète - concentrates this idea, as by being fixed and reflexive, it is nothing other than this poetic language. In this sense, my idea of music is not more aural than visual, but simply time. I believe that it is precisely time as a medium of artistic expression that I have chosen to express myself, and this, by fixing it whatever its perceptive nature.

I find that there is a certain compositional determinism linked to our way of conceiving sound; models of perception and systems of composition easily engender music limited to these own conceptions. I don't think it's impossible to renew one's own musical language through music itself, but I do believe that for me, video is an opportunity to establish this renewal, by setting up, if possible, a device specific to each work.