• 1 Nice, Villa Arson, June 24- October 30 2011, curated by Jean-Marc Avrilla and Eric Mangion. With wo (...)
• 2 Eric Mangion in AVRILLA, Jean-Marc, MANGION, Eric, Le temps de l’écoute, [cat. exp., Nice, Villa Ar (...)

1The most interesting feature of the 2011 exhibition Le Temps de l’Ecoute1 was the way curators Eric Mangion and Jean-Marc Avrilla drew up a comprehensive inventory of sound and music practices on the Côte d’Azur since the fifties, and in doing so, outlined a range of intergenerational theoretical and aesthetic connections as a blueprint for a critical analysis. The show also highlighted the beginnings of a school of thought and a heritage within the artistic landscape that originated with Lars Fredrikson’s teachings on sound at the Villa Arson. Fredrikson’s sound studio brought together a group of artists that included Eléonore Bak, Isabelle Sordage, Ludovic Lignon and Pascal Broccolichi as part of the most long-lasting listening community in a regional sound project based on “fleeting or uncoordinated experiments”. 2The group connected around the transmission of an “art of listening” that was the organic follow-on from the radically non-musical experiments of the first sound artists in the second half of the 20^th century, including Fredrikson himself. Historically, it constituted the first ever sound department in a French art school, well before they became common in the 2000s.

• 3 The École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs de Nice was established in 1972 at the Villa Arson. The sam (...)
• 4 In 1986, the ENAD became the EPIAR (École Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherche). Christian B (...)

2In 1970, Lars Fredrikson joined the faculty at the Villa Arson school, which was then the École des Arts Décoratifs de Nice (ENAD)3, to teach engraving. The following year he became and audio-visual teacher, working alongside Bob Guiny. It is hard to find the exact date for the establishment of the sound studio: we can just say that from 1986, when Christian Bernard4 took over as director of the Villa, it was made an official part of the curriculum. Under the direction of Lars Fredrikson, the sound studio at the Villa Arson was exclusively reserved for “sound art”. It was neither a platform to support multimedia projects nor a place where music was composed. This is why a particular approach to sound flourished there at a time when it was seriously misunderstood by French art schools, and when sound art was struggling to stand out from the world of musical composition.

• 6 “Depending on the perspective, the subject refers back to themselves as an object. Depending on the (...)

4The study of sound in Art History suffers from the ontological difficulty caused by the fragility of the sonic medium relative to other art forms. This fragility is all the more obvious in the approach Lars Fredrikson and his students have to sound, due to factors that make its treatment highly complex. The overlapping factors include their refusal to have sound installations recorded as they insist on the need for a live listening experience, the impossibility of generating a visual document for archive purposes and a tendency to work in analogue which makes the “reconstitution” of sound art difficult. So, in order to better understand the heritage of Lars Fredrikson, we must take into account his attitude to teaching in the way he passed on sound practices and listening, characterised by artistic profiles that, despite their variety, share the need for a live, méthexique6 (responsive), spatial and physical listening experience.

• 8 Ibid p. 198.

7The Fredriksonian approach was “image-phobic” in as much as it violently rejected linguistic and visual structures, as the artist prevented the production of any form of music in the sound studio and distanced himself from the prevailing conceptualist approach of the time. His teaching involved a slow process of deconditioning. The first stage is to question the discreet activity of listening, to become aware of it as a subjective and shared action that is not definitive. Listening the Fredriksonian way involves continuous attention and doubt, tied up with vibratory phenomena. In this way, Fredrikson was in line with Max Neuhaus’ notion of an “aural character”. The “aural character” is perceived by the innate and not the cultural sense of hearing, giving the sound “an extra layer of meaning, added to verbal language8”. This approach can also be explained by the connections Lars Fredrikson and some of his students maintained with the practice of aural poetry, where they were to find a common ground that their interaction with “traditional” artists lacked.

• 9 “In a more general way, it is interesting to point out that these elements of sensitisation to soun (...)
• 10 “Efficiency is the discreet (indirect) way of operating by relying on silent transformations, witho (...)

8During the years when he taught at the sound studio, he did not hold listening sessions outside – like Max Neuhaus’ soundwalks in the seventies, that were to become even more widespread in Murray Schafer’s teaching9–, but the sound studio was essentially a place for philosophical exchanges and listening. These collective and individual sharing sessions, allowed students to understand what went into qualitative listening in spatial terms and its perceptive nuances. Fredrikson exposed them to works by Alvin Lucier, Max Neuhaus and Steve Reich. They learned about the importance of an aural experience that involves the discreet efficiency10 of tiny sound variations and does not thunder.

• 12 BENHAMOU, Maurice, « L’écorché du vide : un suprématisme analogique », in Le regard analogique, Par (...)
• 13 HUNT, Frederick Vinton, Origins in Acoustics, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1978, p. 12.

9In the nineteen sixties, Lars Fredrikson started to create electro-mechanic pieces, collages and paintings that were all, beyond their varied mediums, based on his thinking about invisible forces. In fact, when describing what Fredrikson does, Benhamou coined the expression “analogical Suprematism” to describe the intuitive version of a means of expressing the tensions produced by the “energy of the void” in various ways, the complex structures of what we cannot see. Sound, for Fredrikson, does not exist independently, it is one of the registers of the invisible and can only be understood in terms of frequencies. This way of thinking echoes pythagorean philosophy that describes the ubiquity of inaudible sounds from the telluric scale to the sidereal scale13, and ties up with Suprematism and the early phases of Russian constructivism that so influenced Fredrikson’s work. They share the feeling of a world based on the synchronicity of the universe’s rhythms with our inner rhythms, in other words, an intimate, kinaesthetic connection with the elemental energies.

10The group of artists that emerged from the sound studio shares this thinking about an energy that takes into account an inaudible, invisible “already there”. Pascal Broccolichi’s first contact with Lars Fredrikson happened when listening to VHF (Very High Frequency) radio recordings, taken by Broccolichi while at sea. Today, transduction is a very important part of the artist’s work; he uses it as a basis for his complex “meta-landscapes”. Lignon’s work involves converting electromagnetic micro-events that are generated randomly on electronic circuit boards and manifest through little indicator lights. The sonic language of this listening community is based on exercises involving transduction, equivalency and remanence. They have given the art form a vocabulary that can be seen as the grammar that underpins spatial construction, taking pre-existing architectural data into account that the artists then conjugate with their own structures that can be intangible or physical.

• 14 SORDAGE, Isabelle, unpublished catalogue, p. 5. Some elements are available on the artist’s persona (...)
• 15 Ibid, p. 5.

11Isabelle Sordage came to the Villa Arson in 1984. Her area of interest was entropy in the realm of energy and she examined disorganisation in the living world through mathematical models. “I was so fascinated by chaos and disappearance that the way I approached the sensible was in no way satisfied by the fixed register of images and the visible that was imposed by art schools at the time.”14 Sordage joined the sound studio soon after it opened in 1986, and became its first student. Academic teaching required that she follow an imitative model based on descriptive geometry, “according to the belief that and fine art work had to involved a three-dimensional space.” 15Sordage replaced the metric system she had learned with Hertz units.

• 18 BAK Eleonore, Habiter l’in-vu : formes de visualisations sonores, Architecture, aménagement de l’es (...)

15Eléonore Bak studied art in Cologne. She came to sound in 1985 through her performance experience, and received a research grant to attend the Villa Arson. There, she studied bodily interaction with continuous sound signals and worked mainly with frequency generators. Alongside Lars Fredrikson, she perfected a listening process based on ecological and contextual principles. Her thesis, entitled Habiter l’in-vu: formes de visualisations sonores (Inhabiting the unseen: forms of sound visualisation)18, is a precious record of a theory of listening inherited from her performance experience and her close working relationship with Lars Fredrikson.

• 19 Ibid p. 225.

16By reworking Pierre Schaeffer’s theory of the sound object, based on the three data involved in listening to physical music – sound, music and meaning, Bak chose to replace “music” with “plastic”. 19For Eléonore Bak, the “plastic” data interdepends on the sound and meaning. She constitutes its moving, non-repeatable, situational aspect. The “meaning” that comes from it is interactional, apperceptive and subjective. Its evolution does not serve a musical intention, but a listening process oriented toward the trail of the sound and its instability.

• 20 Ludovic Lignon : http://llignon.net/ (consulted April 12 2018).

17Ludovic Lignon’s final project as a student of Fredrikson works a similar transfer. In 1990/92 (1992), he turns musical sound data into physical sound data. In it, he examines pre-existing musical extracts from CDs, vinyl and tapes as a material in itself. “Numerous musical forms went through a mixing deck at the same time, with no added effects or digital retouching. […] The context was clearly musical but I was accumulating layers of recordings with the intention of a “painter”.20

• 21 On this subject: Gaël Gillon, L’atelier de la création, “Le corps antenne”, a programme by Isabelle (...)
• 22 KAHN, Douglas, “Pauline Oliveros : Sonosphere”, in KAHN, Douglas, Earth Sound Earth Signal, (…), op (...)

19The “body-as-antenna” is the fruit of an ecologist conception of the immediate surroundings that takes multiple factors into account, a means of bodily connection to various inter-related and complex phenomena. Using techniques of concentration and harmonisation, the body gets to a stage of multisensorial convolution where it soaks up an ensemble of data that can be said to be a form of micro-perception. It is the result of prolonged exposure, of apperceptive involvement, and of a slow “deconditioning” from images, a barrier to plastic experience by keeping environmental motifs at bay. Based on unconscious adjustments, the body-as-antenna becomes a prolongation of its environment, in a slowed-down, murky time-frame, an elastic spatiality.21 While Eléonore Bak developed her methodology by exploring the way it resonates physically as opposed to the psychological impact, the concept of the “body-as-antenna” that she developed with Fredrikson created a theoretical connection between listening technically and rationally and a more meditative process that was developed by Pauline Oliveros, throughout her career, based on the global concept of the Sonosphere,22 and termed Quantum listening.

• 24 BAK, op. cit. p. 49. Expression borrowed from Tim Ingold (INGOLD, Tim, Une brève histoire des ligne (...)
• 25 “While we read our map in immersive order, engineers read it as a yes/no system, point by point, li (...)
• 26 Acoustic study room equipped with speakers that allow for the recreation of environments that inclu (...)

21The theoretical and practical confrontation between Bak’s “bodily listening” and that of acoustic engineering reveals much about the analogue trend. The virtuality of management and visualisation of sound through a digital interface, as well as the spatialization of sound based on orthonormal geometric points of reference, is, according to Bak, the equivalent of “technology incarceration”. 24This helps to understand the problems the artist encountered with engineers, in particular due to the complexity of the micro-movements she uses and the reading of her jacquards.25 Nevertheless, she has managed to confirm the technical effectiveness of bodily exploration of the sound space and the validity of her output with experiments carried out in a holophonic Smartroom.26

• 27 Jérôme Joy trained in music. He moved into sharing on networks, and the possibilities provided by t (...)

22Ludovic Lignon took over the management of the Villa Arson’s sound studio in 1991, after Lars Fredrikson left. He organised many listening sessions with loudspeakers and worked hard to continue what Fredrikson had started. Jérôme Joy joined the studio in 1992 and became his assistant for three years. The radical changes Joy made in the studio may have led to Lignon’s decision to leave.27 The studio was moved from a large space to a more confined, soundproof room. It was entirely fitted out with digital equipment which upset the ergonomics, materiality and temporality of the artists’ sound work, as they began to work almost exclusively on screens. This change had an irreversible effect on the nature of the teaching in the studio. The very radical nature of the practice of sound that had been developed there under Fredrikson meant very little was left behind.

• 29 Nice, Villa Arson, July 8 – October 1 1995, curated by Jean-Philippe Vienne. With José Antonio Orts (...)

23In 1995, Jean-Philippe Vienne organised a show at the Villa Arson entitled Murs du Son; Murmures.29 He chose not to establish a definition of an artistic genre, but to propose a non-exhaustive ensemble of sound occurrences in art. Lars Fredrikson presented his Espace intérieur (1975-95), while his old students – Isabelle Sordage, Ludovic Lignon, Pascal Broccolichi – were invited to take part in the “Murmures” installation. This exhibition was the first to confirm the influence of the sound studio’s output and of Lars Fredrikson teaching for a generation of young artists. In the end however, the outstanding characteristic of the heirs to the Villa Arson’s “sound studio” is their role as educators. A number of structures have been established that mean the Fredriksonian listening process is being handed down in new and varied ways.

• 31 Obviously, a tribute by Eléonore Bak to Lars Fredrikson.

25In addition, Eléonore Bak’s research and teaching are a concrete example of the handing down of the Fredriksonian listening process. Her manifold, rich vision of teaching constitutes a veritable academic and artistic extension of the Villa Arson’s “school of sound”. Today, she teaches at ESAL (École Supérieure d’Art de Lorraine), and in 2009 she established the ARS (Atelier de Recherche Sonore).31 The ARS is a framework that welcomes students’ artistic projects involving sound and it raises awareness among participants of the technological and scientific domains involved as well as of a methodology of listening. The Atelier gravitates around Bak, and it has partnerships with the CRESSON, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble, Centrale Supélec and schools in Germany.