FUNCTIONAL WIDTH

Pauline Shongov: conception, sculpture, drawings, photography, analog&digital video
Julien Vincenot: generative music

This live web installation revisits, a year later, the materials developed for the installation diptych Parameter // Perimeter that was presented simultaneously in two separate locations in Cambridge, MA in 2019. The visual part was reduced to a 23 minutes loop for this online version. The music remains generative and endless, constantly scrambling and overlapping ~ 2 hours of sound materials.

Patina is a thin layer of accumulated matter forming naturally on material surfaces over an extended period of time. Often the artisan applies various techniques of wearing, coloration, erasure, polishing or patterning, deliberately trying to simulate this long exposure to time in new artefacts.

Either acquired or applied, patina became a shared concept early on in this collaboration. Pauline Shongov exposes 16mm film to airport security x-rays, the moonlight, and condensation, which quietly penetrate the image, modulate material density, and infuse it with a new atmospheric identity. Julien Vincenot transposes this idea to the digital world, attempting to give new life to synthetic, rigid sound materials by soaking them at length in algorithmic “maceration vats”.

The project was initiated by Shongov during a residency at Casa Poli, near the coast in central Chile. In this renown building designed by the architectural studio Pezo Von Ellrichshausen, windows and glass doors naturally frame the landscape, developing the perception of space organically between the inside and outside, choreographing the movement of light, and animating the presence of wind throughout the day. Located on the edge of a cliff that is sharply exposed to natural forces, the building sits halfway between utopic imagination and tangible ruination. Patinating / patinated place.

The iconic identity of Casa Poli, paired with its precarious and unstable nature, became the source for a singular grammar. The work follows embodied and analytical processes of measurement that carry through visual and sonic registers. Through acts of precision and calculation, the work gives way to a new obsession for architectural shapes and details, repeated at every scale and angle.