Conversations excentrées, Orléans Montargis 2021/2022

I asked Gérard Parésys and Thomas Chrétien to write a text about our work for the Conversations excentrées project. Here they are, and I thank them for it.

In June 2020 Guy said to me: “After water levels: stacks of books…”
The water levels were the collective self-portrait “Trop près du Loing”: dozens of voices told us about the 2016 flood. Working on the sound of these voices fascinated me: projecting them into space, intertwining them… What music!
The 10 “totems” of the Conversations excentrées remind me of staff gauges: those vertical rulers that measure water levels along rivers, on bridges, dams… But the “totems” don’t measure anything; they speak and they show.
The “totems” let us hear 58 “free” conversations and show us 180 images of the 12 recording locations.
Guy and Thomas Chrétien collected all these conversations this summer in the “capsule.”
I created the software that runs on the small computer contained in each of the 10 totems of the Conversations excentrées. So, 10 pieces of software are running at the same time.
The sound of each conversation is quite complex: there are 1, 2… up to 5 speakers talking, sometimes at the same time! The challenge of this installation is to restore these conversations by distributing the speakers: one per totem. The restoration must be clear and obvious: the visitor walking through the installation should have the illusion of hearing a discussion…
The synchronization, the choice of conversations, speakers, totems, and images are controlled by one of the totems.
And then there is the “eccentric” moment of the Conversations excentrées: after 15 minutes of polite discussions, the 10 totems all speak: each emitting a snippet of one of the conversations drawn at random, it accelerates more and more, it overlaps, they all speak at the same time, you can only understand the rare words that emerge from this flood. And then everything stops. Silence. And the discussions can resume calmly. I hope this climax of sound matter can be perceived as musical!
The software in each totem also controls the images and their decomposition/recomposition at the pixel level. Looking carefully, you can see that the direction of pixel movement (like agitated sand) changes with the speaker.
The sound is in the image and the image is in the sound.

Gérard Parésys

Conversations excentrées was the occasion for my first real collaboration with Guykayser. Indeed, I had the chance to work with him from the founding stages, during which he imagined this artistic device, through to the sound collection and the final exhibition setup.
For the initial stages, I was able to act in part as a relay for Olivier Baude in the discussion between arts and sciences. The aim was to intertwine the interest of creating a sound portrait for linguistic research with Guy’s artistic vision. This quickly materialized through exchanges with partners, primarily the media library networks of Orléans and Montargis. Plenty of food for thought on my side regarding contributory research, a theme that particularly interests me in my thesis work. Files to present to funders and other provisional schedules “slightly” impacted by successive lockdowns: that’s the behind-the-scenes story…
The collection phase in the spring and summer allowed us to gather the sound material that Guy then processed with Gérard Parésys to create the exhibition. But for us, across the entire project, it was also about testing the listening, recording, and data/metadata management protocol of the Mobile Language Laboratory.
Finally, setting up the exhibition was an opportunity for me to understand Guy and Gérard’s work even better from the inside. And as with the sound collections, realizing that bringing a long-matured project to the public brings real satisfaction.

Thomas Chrétien