Acoustic Cameras

Sound annexation project

What is Acoustic Cameras?
Sound and music for live cameras, created by guest artists: composers, poets, sound artists from all countries. Acoustic Cameras was created on January 1, 2016. It is an artistic project in the form of a website (www.acousticcameras.org). To date, more than 100 international artists are participating in this project.

Who is Acoustic Cameras?
A collective of visual, sound and design artists. Its creators and members are Pierre Beloüin, Christophe Demarthe, Didier Hochart, Nicolas Ledoux and Thierry Weyd. They constitute the editorial team.

How does it work?
The invited artist chooses a camera among thousands of live webcams proposed by the editorial team. He/she composes a music and/or a sound piece for this camera. The editorial team aggregates the sound and camera and puts them online.

Which structures carry AC ?
Acoustic Cameras is co-edited by Optical Sound (Pierre Beloüin & P. Nicolas Ledoux) and La manufacture des Cactées (Didier Hochart & Thierry Weyd) on a proposal by Christophe Demarthe. Graphic design : www.abm-studio.com / Development : Didier Hochart.

ACOUSTIC CAMERAS invites composers and sound artists to annex the real-time flow of webcams located in various places around the world.

The flow of webcams is intercepted but not modified. The artist is invited to deliver a sound piece or piece of music related to this flow; This sound piece acting as a modification of reality.

The resulting work is the encounter of a recorded sound piece and the live capture of a fluctuating landscape. Depending on the season, depending on weather, depending on time of day or night, the camera sweeps continuously the filmed location (seaside, city or mountain) and writes in real time the film of the artist's music. Music or sound design, by monopolizing the filmed landscape, soon takes on a narrative, dramatic dimension, according to the principles of film music. At the slight difference that here the film is written simultaneously.

Stay tuned ! Acoustic Cameras expands continually, regularly enriched with new works of artists.

Thierry Fournier

Sightseeing (Penser voir)

Beach - Benicàsim - Spain

lat.: 40.0575, long.: 0.0856

About the work

Document sans nom Une caméra de vidéosurveillance filme une plage. Nous entendons sa voix, comme si elle était vivante. Le niveau de perfection de son intelligence l'aurait amenée à douter et à ne plus savoir quoi faire. Elle pense tout haut et fait part de ses interrogations : Qu’est-ce que c’est ? Que doit-elle regarder ? Comment reconnaître un paysage ? Qu'est-ce qu'un comportement suspect ? Mais surtout, à quoi sert-elle ? Elle ne comprend rien. Comme si elle était en burn-out, elle se compare aux travailleurs du clic sous-payés qui alimentent les intelligences artificielles, questionnant le sens de son travail, dans un anthropomorphisme qui soulève les enjeux politiques de ces dispositifs.

A CCTV camera films a beach. We hear her voice, as if she were alive. The level of perfection of her intelligence would have led her to doubt and not know what to do. She thinks out loud and shares her questions: What is it? What should she look at? How to recognize a landscape? What is suspicious behavior? But above all, what's the use of all that? She does not understand anything. As if she were in burn-out, she compares herself to the underpaid click workers who feed the artificial intelligences, questioning the meaning of her work with an anthropomorphism that raises the political stakes of these techniques.

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About the artist

Thierry Fournier is a French artist and curator living in the Paris area; he holds an Architecture degree from the Lyon Architecture College. His work forms the hypothesis of a life of things (objects, network, technologies …) to question the way in which the identity, the otherness and the limits of the human are deeply replayed in the relations with them. His practice ranges from installations, objects, videos to prints, photographs, performances, sound works. He teaches also at EnsadLab PSL (Paris) and Ensad Nancy art college.

Coming soon!

Thierry Fournier

About the work

About the artist