Upon entering the room that houses the work Schizoframes by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, one is struck by the sight of spectators lounging on a big white sofa. Seeing their abandoned bodies and peaceful faces, one feels an urge to join them and observe what is being shown on the opposite wall. Once settled in on that large couch, the spectator feels strange vibrations in his or her body, vibrations that seem to sound in unison with the sweeping psychedelic-like abstract forms and triple projection. Is the artist trying to send us back to the sixties? Is he enjoying himself by reactivating the synaesthetic works of La Monte Young?

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is a trained musician, who started his career in theatre, where he was the composer for the company "Side One Posthume Theatre", led by choreographer and stage director Pascal Rambert. Since 1994, he has developed his own auditory experiments through complex installations within the field of visual arts. He has not, however, lost his sense of dramaturgy. In each of his works, the artist develops a taste for the mise en scène and reflects on ways to make the visitors linger within them. All they have is indications, which are all integrated. In several works the chair or the sofa are central elements that invite taking possession of that place, to install oneself at leisure, thus opening oneself to the perceptual and sensory proposition. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot adores the hidden potential of new media, and revisits some of its flagship protocols, such as the closed circuit installation, the Larsen effect or the principle of feedback. "Schizoframes" is the generic title of a series of audiovisual installations, started in 2003, that explore the possibilities of feed-back video. Here, images that are generated by a process that has its origin in video art are projected in full light. A camera is placed opposite a monitor on stand-by, which reproduces the images filmed by said camera. Abstract and hypnotic signs appear, infinitely changing and morphing, at different rates. The music—heavily charged Zen, humming and clear—that accompanies the life and loss of those forms, heavily charged Zen, humming and clear, is obtained by the transduction of images into audio frequencies. The video signal is converted into audio frequencies and altered to generate sub-base pulses, broadcast by the loudspeakers that are integrated into the sofa. The system is a whole, each manifestation is a translation of another. The works of this artist all share this common principle: what you see, is also what elaborates the music.

Schizoframes is heir to the experiments of La Monte Young, in the sense that it cannot be reduced to the system, nor to the sound it creates or records. The works exist as a phenomenon, like a living organism that self-regenerates, subject to chance; depending on the person experimenting with it, who is both coiled up and projected there, who reveals his birth and conditions his present.

Florence Parot