Guillaume Pascale
Guillaume Pascale is an artist-researcher haunted by an unstable imagination that oscillates between physical and informational environments. Sometimes flirting with documentary skidding, his works compose programmed drifts through a dynamic arrangement of sounds, images and data, within electronic or audiovisual devices that seek to question the current techno-scientific regime of understanding the world. From this perspective, his recent research explores the contemporary spatial imaginary, and aims to engage with, through sensitive experiences, the notion of planetarity.
Behind the avatar Err is Human, he produces situated electroacoustic fictions, composed with different data streams and equipment he has developed and designed, to offer a sensitive and collective experience of distant or even invisible phenomena or events.
His works and performances have already been presented at various events, museums and galleries in Europe and North America, including the Biennale Internationale d’Art Numérique in Montreal, the InterAccess gallery in Toronto, the Musée Art et Archéologie in Valence, the Ars Electronica festival in Austria and the Octobre Numérique festival in Arles.
Europa(to)Europa is the audiophonic odyssey of an exile, an unintelligible science-fiction tale in which digital data streams weave the synthetic melodies of a drift between two heterotopias 628 million kilometers apart. In this correspondence between an island in the Indian Ocean and a natural satellite of Jupiter, the processes of statistical rationalization of the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial environment are de-measured.
Each piece – recorded in a single take and composed with continuous streams of quantization – sculpts an accidental space-time where each note seems to float between past, present, and future. This stripped-down, almost meditative approach eludes any rational reading grid. Here, the island’s environmental data, or the calculation of planetary movements, dictate the conduct of synthesizers in time. The composer must then modulate live a set of forces and ratios that have become anonymous, raw and indifferent to measurement. These flows become signs of an elsewhere that exists without waiting to be understood. Outside the stable grip of their values, a space of uncertainty opens up, where a series of mutant states evade any definitive grasp.
At the end of the album, the myth of Europa emerges as a key to this journey. The daughter of Sidon, seduced and then abducted by Jupiter in the form of a bull, embodies a story of hold and uprooting. In this episode recounted by Horace, the “waves and stars,” in the midst of which the princess lets herself be carried away, become witnesses to a dispossession: that of lives and territories snatched away in the name of an all-consuming spirit of conquest and understanding. In Europa (to) Europa, this mythological and historical memory haunts the final composition. In this sense, the album is not simply an interplanetary musical journey; it invites us to let ourselves be traversed by what exists, to welcome strangeness as a disturbance that destabilizes dominant narratives. Between the lines of power and the technologies that shape our civilization, music opens up a critical space: a movement that thwarts rationalization to reinvent our way of inhabiting the world and letting ourselves be inhabited by its necessary incomprehension.
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 