セレスト・ブルシエ＝ムジュノ
셀레스트 브루시에-무주노

from here to ear

source: pemorg

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot produces music in surprising and unexpected ways through large-scale acoustic environments. Boursier-Mougenot’s immersive sonic installation, from here to ear, introduces a flock of 70 brightly plumed Zebra Finches to a gallery-turned-aviary to live among iconic Gibson Les Paul and Thunderbird bass guitars. At turns ambient and melodic, a constantly changing soundscape emerges as the finches explore their environment, eating, nesting and perching on the amplified instruments. This boundary-breaking exhibition asks us to consider the way we perceive, create and interact with music while challenging traditional notions of artistic collaboration. Generous support provided by FreePort funders Jeffrey P. Beale and Fay Chandler. Presented with the support of the Institut Français and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States. Additional support provided by the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum.
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source: theguardian
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot can find musical potential in just about anything. In the past two decades, the Paris-based artist’s sonic adventures have included getting vacuum cleaners to play harmonicas, by attaching them to the nozzles. Floating crockery has doubled as percussion instruments. Little birds have rocked out with guitars. Street life, trees blowing in the wind and even the feedback from his recording equipment have all been translated into sound art.
Boursier-Mougenot originally trained not as an artist but as a musician, at the Conservatory for Music in Nice. His time as composer for the avant-garde Pascal Rambert theatre company, from 1985 to 1994, pushed his work into more experimental realms. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to stage sound installations in art galleries, venues where his ideas for compositions could unfold over long stretches of time.
Boursier-Mougenot’s approach has something in it of John Cage’s belief that “everything we do is music”. Yet he does not embrace the chaos of sound that floods daily life, on its own terms, as Cage did. Rather, he creates highly orchestrated situations where something as random as where a bird chooses to alight or how the wind brushes through a tree’s leaves can create new kinds of music, reveal hidden patterns.
In an untitled work first staged in 1999, plates, cups and glasses float around in blue paddling pools, creating, with the aid of microphones, an amplified jingle of clangs and tinkles. It is far from left to chance: the water temperature is carefully controlled, the current of the paddling pools determined by pumps. With a similar exactitude, Boursier-Mougenot’s Recycle (2006) exchanges sound and movement between the natural and technological worlds. Cameras filming tree branches relate their movements to a grid of metal wall fans, which pump out air that echoes the pattern of the wind. Yet another work, Videodrones, created for New York’s Paula Cooper gallery in 2002, used the humming sound generated when a video recorder is attached to a sound amplifier. While real-time surveillance images were projected in the gallery, the art space resounded with the buzz of life on the streets.
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source: slate

The young male zebra finch alighted on the nearest guitar and bounced across the mahogany fret board. He stumbled on the high E string—it was harder to grip against the polished wood. Then with an inquisitive side-glance, he sang a few bars, stretching his wings, and occasionally breaking off as if awaiting some sort of reply. Then he was finished. He defecated on the frets before uttering a final, insistent nasal call and flitting down to the sand below.

The guitar lay horizontal, propped up by a stainless steel cymbal stand. It had a white finish, perhaps the ideal paint job for concealing the bird droppings that peppered its otherwise gorgeous body. Every time a bird landed, took off, or hopped on its strings, the notes played through a nearby amplifier with preprogrammed digital effects: reverb, overdrive, digital delay.

The guitar is one of 14 chromatically tuned rock instruments—10 Gibson Les Pauls, four Gibson Firebirds—wired up inside the Barton Gallery at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.* They’ve stood there for four months, kept in tune for an orchestra of 70 zebra finches. The birds live in the space, which functions as a temperature-controlled aviary on the museum.

The birds’ ghost conductor is Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, a French composer and artist who has become a master at encouraging birds to make music. He does so by creating a kind of musical ecosystem. Called From Here to Ear, this is his 15th installation in a series of works spanning 15 years and cities around the world, from London to Berlin to Milan to Brisbane, Australia. (Click that last city for some amazing looks behind the scenes.)

In every city the exhibit has been wildly popular, and the prevailing question among its visitors has been the same: Do the birds know they’re making music?

“We think they do,” says Trevor Smith, the museum’s curator of contemporary art.

The birds are a mixed-age flock, about half males and half females. Three nest condos are hung from the ceiling, and the floor is covered with sand and patches of tall grass to mimic the finches’ natural environment—Australian grassland. Zildjian cymbals are filled with either water or food.

As the birds adjusted to the space, the artist adjusted his instruments.

It took about three days to install the guitars, Smith says, and then Boursier-Mougenot “went through roughly a 10-day process of tweaking the sounds, thinking about which notes would come from where, which effects would come from where.”

Boursier-Mougenot calls the installation “a device—a plan. It’s a piece that’s impossible for humans to play.” Instead, the birds are his “flying fingers,” and after his departure the room takes on a life and a rhythm of its own.

Entering the space, your first instinct is to be silent, to stand still as you would while watching a wild animal in its natural habitat. But our interaction with the birds is part of the exhibit.

“The birds are also responding to our presence,” says Smith. “This is the nature of the work. The room is like a three-dimensional score, each of the guitars offers a certain sonic experience, and the birds choose where and how to interact with the room.”

Those choices shift when people walk around the guitars and beneath the aviaries. It’s obvious the birds respond to human presence, but how they react is surprising. Rather than avoiding human visitors, these finches seek them out, showing great curiosity and desire to explore anything new that enters their space.

All that movement also creates more music. Smith says the birds think of the guitars as musical trees.

“Basically the room is their world now,” Smith said as he walked among the instruments. A female finch alighted on his shoe and he paused before gingerly taking another step. The finch stayed on board, tugging at the seams of his moccasins.

“This is the first time one has ever landed on me,” he whispered excitedly. “It’s pretty cool.”

Zebra finches are incredibly social and curious by nature, and they perform extremely well in Boursier-Mougenot’s orchestrated aviary.

“I am entirely fulfilled by my relationship with the Zebra Finches,” the artist said in an email when asked whether he was considering different birds for future exhibitions. “I don’t exclude the possibility of new partners, but as in all great love stories, it depends in part on the chance encounters life brings along.”

He found the birds currently in residence at the Peabody Essex through a casting company, Animal Actors Inc.

“They’re very social, they’re very musical, they have a very distinct appearance with that orange beak,” Smith says of the finches. “They’re almost like a companion species.”

Scientists have long used captive zebra finches to study birdsong, courtship, and brain circuitry. Heather Williams of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., has worked with the birds for 25 years.

“Zebra finches are perfect for captivity,” she says. “They breed year round. The color green and high humidity trigger their breeding behavior, so in the presence of those elements they can breed continuously.”

There’s certainly a lot of breeding going on in the heat of the Barton Gallery.*

“We dispose of the eggs,” Smith explained. “The finches breed fairly rapidly, so we do what any breeder or pet owner would do that doesn’t want to be overrun by birds.”

What’s really striking is how bird courtship drives the ongoing performance of Boursier-Mougenot’s work. Rather than being deterred or inhibited by the sonic qualities of their environment, it seems as if the birds take ownership of the music as a means of interaction with one another.

“I think they’re perfectly capable of learning the consequences of hopping on one string versus another,” said Williams.

Birds of the same species often develop distinct regional dialects, demonstrating that their songs are not entirely innate but can be molded by what they hear around them. Williams agreed that the presence of actively resonating instruments could easily affect song development in younger males still in the early stages of song development.

“Birds that grow up in cities with a lot of traffic noise tend to develop songs that avoid the traffic noise,” she explained as a point of comparison. “During the learning process these birds develop a song that uses a clear channel.”

In the wild, cutting through the mix can be essential not only for birds looking to attract mates but also for young birds trying to learn their parents’ songs. Williams went on to speculate that the finches could also demonstrate a preference for particular sounds in the exhibit and use them as a basis for imitation and new song composition, as well as adaptations in courtship behavior.

A male sings to a female in a separate cage to the left edge of the video frame. Video courtesy of Heather Williams.

The male birds do a courtship dance that’s coordinated with their song and involves pivoting from side to side and shifting as they move closer to the female. If they hop on certain strings, they could potentially coordinate the sound of the instruments with their overall courtship display.

“I have observed a lot of interesting behavior since January,” said Bradley Benedetti, a museum interpreter who spends hours a day at the exhibit. “I think the males are more interested in looking down at everything, to find a mate, and to keep watch on any competition. I call them scouts. The three guitars in the middle of the space, which only have a distortion effect on them, seem to be where the birds made a connection that they had something to do with the noise. After they made that connection, I noticed their relation to those guitars, and the bass guitars as well, changed.”

At its core, From Here to Ear is a piece of performance art. The environment is totally fabricated, the supply of food and water is constant, and the birds are bred in captivity. There’s even a veterinarian who tends regularly to the flock.

But that doesn’t mean the birds aren’t also behaving naturally. Even as professional animal actors, their resilience and adaptability around electrified instruments, blaring amps, and a stream of human visitors is remarkable. It reflects a successful adaptation that many bird species have made: tolerance to closer proximity with human settlements. It also gives us a chance to see their personalities as visitors to their world.
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source: lespressesdureel
Présentés exclusivement dans les lieux d’art contemporain, les travaux de Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (né en 1961 à Nice, vit et travaille à Sète) sont à considérer avant tout comme ceux d’un musicien. Après avoir été compositeur jusque dans les années 1990, il entreprend de donner une forme autonome à sa musique en réalisant des installations.
À partir de matériaux, de situations ou d’objets les plus divers dont il extrait un potentiel musical, il élabore des dispositifs qui étendent la notion de partition aux configurations hétérodoxes des matériaux et des médias qu’il emploie pour générer, le plus souvent en direct, des formes sonores qu’il qualifie de vivantes. Déployé en relation avec les données architecturales ou environnementales des lieux d’exposition, chaque dispositif constitue le cadre propice à une expérience d’écoute en livrant, au regard et à la compréhension du visiteur, le processus qui engendre la musique.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot considère, en premier lieu, le livre comme de l’espace, un support pour l’expérience du lecteur, dans lequel il est question de faire entrer du temporel, le temps de la lecture.
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source: taringanet
El músico y compositor francés Céleste Boursier-Mougenot crea obras basándose en los ritmos de los ruidos de la vida cotidiana para producir sonidos en formas inesperadas; sin dudas, recuerda a la corriente de Fluxus, a John Cage y su arte experimental (sobre todo la obra 4′ 33” en la que el sonido del público es la obra, ya que es silencio).
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source: exibart
Boursier-Mougenot utilizza i materiali quotidiani, l’attrezzatura sonora e gli strumenti musicali come oggetti, come cose del mondo, questo vale anche per i video che scorrono in loop sulle pareti della galleria. L’artista crea così installazioni sonore, che definisce corps sonore, che accompagnano durante il percorso il visitatore attraverso una serie di vere e proprie esperienze sensoriali da vivere in maniera del tutto personale. Tratto distintivo dell’artista francese è l’uso di oggetti e materiali comuni privati della loro originaria funzione, disposti nello spazio in modo nuovo ed insolito riuscendo a cambiare il nostro modo di percepirli per quello che sono in realtà.
La “prima presenza” che ci accoglie è Untitled (2013): due palloncini che fluttuano per la stanza spinti da un ventilatore posto a terra e rivolto verso l’alto; ad un palloncino è legato un microfono e all’altro un minispeacker. La cosa divertente è che quando i due palloncini si avvicinano si crea un fenomeno, feedback, che termina quando si allontanano. La “seconda presenza” si intitola Plex (2013): questa è un’altra sfaccettatura della ricerca di Boursier-Mougenot che si concentra sulla sperimentazione con la videocamera e l’audiovisivo, l’opera è composta da un divano e due poltroncine a forma di pietra disposte al centro della stanza e tutt’intorno, sulle pareti, sono proiettate le immagini delle scodelle galleggianti in piscina che magicamente troveremo nell’ultima stanza. All’interno del divano, inoltre, sono stati inseriti tre speaker attraverso i quali è possibile sentire il suono ricavato dal movimento delle scodelle della piscina.
Quella del divano è un ottimo escamotage, studiato dall’artista, per permettere ai visitatori di godere con calma le sue Presenze e per entrarvi ancora di più in sintonia in modo da diventarne essi stessi parte integrante, anche se momentanea, delle installazioni. Sedersi, guardare e prendere tempo per immergersi in uno spazio dove le opere invitano a dialogare perché “parlano”, “ci parlano”. La “terza presenza” è un nuovo pezzo Karambolage (2013): un bel pianoforte a coda mascherato da biliardo dove le palle si scontrano creando non un rumore ma una melodia, come l’Artista dice “Sono fenomeni accidentali che diventano musica”. La mostra si conclude con la “quarta presenza” un vero e proprio coup de théâtre uno dei suoi pezzi più famosi Untitled (2013): una piscina rotonda incastonata nel pavimento della galleria in cui parecchie scodelle di ceramica bianca di diverse dimensioni galleggiano trasportate dall’azzurro liquido della vasca, il loro sbattere le une con le altre crea una melodia ed un’atmosfera che scandisce il tempo ma contemporaneamente catapulta in un’atmosfera altra, magica, da fiaba.
Boursier-Mougenot è un artista che con le sue opere ci spiazza, perché è capace di creare e ricreare con nuove modalità espressive oggetti quotidiani che sono sì naturali, ma al tempo stesso (s)travolgenti e regala ad ognuno di noi la possibilità di crearci un tempo ed uno spazio intimi che vanno oltre il nostro sentire ed immaginare. Allora godiamocele queste “Presenze”, perché se l’immaginazione si apre a cose nuove non potrà mai tornare com’era in precedenza.
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source: daninamewordpress
Nascido em Nice, em 1961, Boursier-Mougenot se aproxima aqui de John Cage e das experiências que Nam June Paik fez com instrumentos musicais, vitrolas antigas e discos em vinil.
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source: tokyoartbeat
最初に出合う音はセレスト・ブルシエ＝ムジュノの《クリナメン》だ。白い空間の中央に張られた大きな青い池。その水面を、大小さまざまな白い磁器が浮かんでおり、ときどき器同士がぶつかりあって、音を発する。彼が手がけるサウンド・インスタレーションは非日常的な視覚空間の中に聞き覚えのある音の要素を含んでいるという。日常では雑音とされる音を独自のアプローチで再現している作品だ。インドネシアのガムラン音楽さながらの心地よい音色が時おり、かすかに会場に響き渡る。