Avatar Scan(s)

“The human ear offers not just another hole in the body, but a hole in the head.” 

Douglas Kahn

Twenty years ago. The birth of Avatar, like a response to Douglas Kahn’s cry made at the same time: “Let the clamor begin!” It proceeded from a laborious foraging here and there in search of theoretical elements questioning silence, noise, interference and the like, along with their polysemous genealogy. Phonographic twists and turns. We are not far from the proliferation of sound studies, whose guiding spirits included the likes of Jonathan Sterne. Also in the early 1990s, underneath all this was a sound art that was still searching for a name, composed of miscellaneous elements given familiar labels. Wireless Imagination takes note, and evolves from this shattered “tradition.” Avatar as well. A vibrant pioneer, keeping a close watch on all the burrowings and foragings in the field.

“The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates ‘more options’ with ‘greater freedom.’ ”
Brian Eno

Avatar is now strategically placed to respect and respond to Eno’s famous maxim, a smile on its lips, given its expertise, established from its earliest years, its keen insights into the potential of technological advances, its ability to avoid repeating the same theme in new guises, its matchless capacity to educate critics when they drape themselves in norms that are… usurped. Trying to impose their rhythm, while micro-vortices and agitators rumble beneath the surface. Enforced slow motion. For those not duped by views fetishizing the sound or the supposed means to master it (by reducing its parameters), or for those who refuse a Promethean view of a subject—exemplified, it seems to us, by bodyhacking—Avatar has unheard-of resources, generated by new technologies, to undermine the belief in the West’s old motto: originality. Which is what, in a conversation in Aix-en-Provence, Jocelyn Robert revealed, inspired by Bernard Edelman’s Le sacre de l’auteur: namely, that these technologies “do not create new ways of doing things; they create new communities in which the roles remain to be redefined. While certain humanist philosophers will consider this a catastrophe, our role is to explore these observations, to re-question them, and to allow the practices and works stemming from them to clearly emerge.”

An agent of diversion(s), then, in the apt words of Avatar’s president. A catalyst of multi-track projects, eschewing the spectacular. Opting for the unexpected distortion, the miniscule derailment, the twilight zone. Upsetting the requirements of “standard models,” which quietly smooth away (i.e. erase) all the harshness of a rendering of a work or a derivative, whether disturbing or playful, of a process. And of its gestures, in equal proportion. In opposition, then, to this parenthesizing, if not blacklisting, of contexts, to work rather towards the emergence of absent entities, dispersive to use Julie Perrin’s word, of buried, unheard-of space-times... discretely awaiting their time, like Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon’s Temps individuels.

The adventure continues! Let’s hear it for Avatar!