ErikM

Ohrwurm

erikm — 2023-07-21T13:23:02Z

Ohrwurm
Installation - 2023
Polyvinyl chloride
Variable dimensions
Floor-standing or pedestal-mounted
Ohrwurm is a modular installation, suitable for both small spaces
(as in the photo) and large ones. This deafening work features a random
score of electronic music.

click on picture

Borne

erikm — 2018-11-13T11:49:10Z

Borne - Milestone
code sacré - Sacred Code
Sound installation, ceramics and sound system 33 x 12 x 10.5 cm.

There are a lot of photos and film footage left over from World War I. In terms of sound, though, there is only one film that recorded a measure of the sound vibrations on Armistice Day. That representation of sound shows all the magnitude of the sound of the artillery on the Western Front in Moselle. It preserves the sound of one minute before and one minute after the Armistice on November 11, 1918. The first minute still reflects the clamor of weapons tearing through the soil, to be replaced at 11 o'clock sharp by a flatline : "the silence."

At the instigation of the Gamerz Festival (Aix-en-Provence), whose artistic mission is to explore the languages of machines in all their forms, I wanted to use this piece to re-inject, much like a temporal echo, the question of code into a historical context. The piece's title refers to the milestones showcased in the work of French artist and WWI infantryman Gaston Deblaize, which were made out of ceramics and contained sacred battlefield soil from Verdun.

This sound piece is made up of 16 codes played randomly. These codes were created by Choctaw soldiers from the U.S. Army in October 1918, for the purpose of radio communication between regiments, battalions, etc.

Up until then, every country communicated in their own language, but Colonel A. W. Bloor knew that messages were being intercepted by the enemy. Under his initiative, the future Code Talkers were first tasked with adapting the polysynthetic Choctaw language to the military vocabulary of that time. So First Battalion became a grain of corn, a colonel became a deer, and a general became a buffalo. Those transpositions, which I find very poetic, inspired me to find those codes and to make them audible again.

The 18 Code Talkers of the 36th Division, Company E, used these codes via DeForest BC-14A military radios on the night of October 26, 1918. This new ruse disoriented the enemy and in the space of three days, it had retreated.

These volunteer soldiers, whose language was unfamiliar to the many ethnic groups fighting in the war, played a pivotal role in the enemy's surrender. The Choctaws were guarantors of the code until it was declassified in 1968. Recognition and gratitude from the West were a long time coming.

Furthermore, the end of the Great War marked the beginning of the industrialization of agriculture, leading to a deep transformation of the land and landscapes and eventually to the genetic modification of living things. In these landscapes, now polluted to the extreme, the contrast with Native American cosmogony is glaring. As land is sacred and inviolable, the concept of wealth and the accumulation of goods are considered a mental illness. In their culture, the land on which they live does not belong to them because they are the land, they belong to the land.

"In the nineteenth century, an old Choctaw chief predicted that the language of his people would cross the ocean and save lives. "

Erikm 2018

My thanks to : Judy Allen, Dora M. Wickson, Mafalda Camara and Olivier Zol, François Martig & Emilie Roi, Diane Eberhardt.

The piece to integrate in 2019 the collection of Chahta Foundation
at Durant Oklahoma, Usa

Border

erikm — 2010-01-06T14:56:00Z

Installation, cut and print cardboard, steel frame, variable dimensions

The area of technical reproducibility opens a way to a sacralised relation to the art piece and its mass consumption.
Disincarnation of an alleged original “aura” of the “master-work” in the industrial serialisation of its artefacts. Here, puzzles of master pieces are broken up to their very pieces, and lined up according to the reading order and reset on empty metallic frames.
Stocking of fragmentary data of a passed history devoted to art, the slices recall the graphic bars compacted into hard disks, getting rid of its obsolete memories as time goes by. The rhythmic formulas cut the space into virtual continuums, as a kind of digital landscape to monochrome variations.
From a certain point of view, a visual frontier appears, creating an irisation effect sometimes interrupted by the possibility to pass in between the lines.

Amygdale

erikm — 2010-01-06T12:58:00Z

Boxing Helmet, sensors, electronic device

Inserted into fighting helmets, eye sockets connected to electronic sensors broadcast a high pressure acoustic frequency. The system is inspired by a new type of despotic weapon conceived to maintain order :
reference to the acoustic bombers used during war time to upset nerves, to the hyper-frequency device that causes trouble and sickness used by the G-20 to prevent insurrection, or to the “Beethoven”, those ultrasounds audible only by teenagers and used in Great Britain to keep squatters away from building halls.
The device invites us to enter a fracture of the repressive system, constricted in between two isolating walls, in between two bowed heads, in between two tonsils : encephalon nucleus keeping signs of our fears.
The art piece takes place in the infra-thin chink of an oppressed freedom, where the fight against pressure and social control in power is questioned.

Écran Total

erikm — 2010-01-06T12:45:00Z

Installation, Wood frame, striped canvas, variable dimensions

In between low and high tech, the art piece puts up a screen to eRikm's moving and transversal languages.
Canvas, frame, industrial colours and formal abstractions refer to a certain history of art which surfaces, as if medium and materials have been re-digested. Wefts, streaks and stretched pixels replay the graphic resolutions set on analogical editing tables/ mixing desk.
In this chromatic and graphic familiar environment, the tarpaulins turn themselves into TV test patterns and the screen refers to the idea of filters : for models, connection filters, filters for a reality perceived through the lines of a canvas.

Version 650 cm X 400 cm

Simulacres set

erikm — 2009-12-03T00:20:00Z

video installation ∞ 2009
Concept : eRikm
Extract 30 seconds
commissioned by les instants video

video 1 : FRAGS / video 2 : HOPIS / video 3 : PARTS
video 1 : RED / video 2 : GREEN / video 3 : BLUE
1 sign shop

"Simulacres Série" consists in accumulating moving light and layering sounds, music, and sounds, sometimes simultaneously.
Each of the 3 videos - "FRAGS", "HOPIS", "PARTS" - takes up an original movie : 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (M. Haneke, 1995), Koyaanisqatsi : Life Out of Balance (G. Reggio, 1982), The Elementary Particles (O. Roehler, 2006).
These movies were chosen from their subjects - fragmentation, time, chance, accident- but also from their formal characteristics : colorimetry, acoustics...

From image-motion to light / from sound film to white noise,
The recomposition of this matrix, manipulated through the technological prism, veils a set of veils that can only veil other veils.
The videos from "Simulacres Série" can be presented on their own, or as an installation (triptych).

Support of DICREAM

the video one follows is small documentary ! !

VA©UUM

erikm — 2008-11-28T12:49:00Z

Video installation
Concept : eRikm
Extract : 02.57mn
Original time : 40.52mn
7 Specific screens

Order of creation / Theme ::The transparent body : :
Project commissionned by Théâtre le Merlan scène nationale Marseille
and APHM Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Marseille

the video one follows is small documentary !!

L'Aitre Blanche

erikm — 2008-11-09T23:29:02Z

Acousmatic & light installation
10 PVC tubes, 10 HP, 10 fluorescent tubes

Aître Blanche is done in October 2008 at the Aître Saint Maclou* (Rouen, France). Nowadays, art school of the town, the Aître Saint Maclou has been a mass grave for the plague that happened in the 12th and 16th centuries. And boneyards are still laying under its floor.

Aître Blanche is a night installation consisting of 10 black PVC sculptures (tubes) 15cmx500cm high, each equipped with a loudspeaker and a fluorescent tube.
This work is about family secrets (structures), unspoken things, lies transmitted consciously or not through generations.

The 10 tubes represent polymorphic entities, male/female and trans-generational aspects of a family.
This topic came to me by chance. The idea at the beginning was to collect confidences (from my family and friends, but also from public areas, movies…).

Words, sentences, strong, simple but fundamental.
Those words, after a selection, got randomly displayed in a row or superimposed ; and that created (after what I would call a work of generational sieving) male/female groups on several generations. From those manipulations and layouts appeared, among others, a topic about child abuse.
The “acousmatic” composition, organisation as well as acoustic scenography became then related to this central topic.

* L'Aître (from the latin word “atrium”) Saint Maclou, former medieval cemetery

the video one follows is small documentary !

TunnelMuziek

erikm — 2008-10-03T08:33:04Z

Sound installation
music & Light
Commission by Happy New Ears Festival
Kortrijk . Belgium

The first time I entered this tunnel intending to create 2 sound pieces, almost immediatly, Hieronymus Bosch's
painting came to my mind, mostly with the second panel of his series « visions of after life », Ascent of the blessed.

At this very moment, a car passed by with extremely loud speakers and made the space resound with heroic Metal music.
The Metal music and its related social and cultural codes, partly rooted in religious worlds, have always been funny
to me (Judgement day, and so on).
Certain elements from NDE accounts (Near Death Experience) are perceptible in this tunnel :

• The passage from one space to another
• the light
• The shifting colours of the architecture
• The meetings
• The spiral

In this transcient space, I felt like working for the citizens who are used to walk through this tunnel
as they are significantly exposed to the same noise pollution that, alas, also exists in so many public places.

Music : erikm
Voice : Wendy van Wynsberghe & An Mertens

aUTOPORTRAIT

erikm — 2007-01-06T15:08:00Z

Video installation, Quadris-phonie

From a picture of him taken on the Web, eRikm shatters himself to be reincarnated into time and space decentered zones. The original picture, sifted through the ASCII code (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), turns into a series of numbers.
Read by a digital voice, it turns into a sound poem spread from the center of the acoustic space. Then injected in a Doppler, the series is randomly read again, and finally resets the original portrait in the video virtual space.
Through this boomerang system, the installation expresses this ubiquity relation to the art piece : the gift of being here and there at the same time, symptom of an “X” generation called “digital migrants”.

// “X' generation refers to those who were born between the 60's and the 80's, stuck in between two times. X for anonymous and nomad, like this generation conscious of its burst.
A generation of “digital migrants”, caught between the last analogical reflexes and the adaptation to the new technology evolutions.