The artist William Jourdain aka Automatisme creates generative electronic music in
the ambient dub techno genre that he continually reshapes through post-production.
His artistic practice questions globalization and saturation of time and current space.
The sound installation presented here is entitled Ultra-Scape (Extended Version). It's
a dense, extended soundscape inspired by the Chain Reaction and Echospace
[Detroit] record labels. It is a work generated from field recordings at the botanical
garden Jardin Daniel A. Séguin in Saint-Hyacinthe/Canada recorded during the early
spring of 2023. These sounds were then modified several times. Their variations are
modulators in Ableton Live, the Digital Audio Workstation used. Jourdain has
augmented and reshaped this material in the studio like a constantly changing
landscape. This work is intended to be broadcast at the same volumes as the
environment in which it is installed and also to be performed in a different season
than when the original recordings were made. Listening to this mix of two
simultaneous soundscapes is a creation in itself that is harmonious and democratic
between nature and humans and the formation of another-season (Alter-Scape/UltraScape).
Invited by EXPRESSION art gallery, artist and curator William Jourdain presents the
collective digital art exhibition Les paysage autres in french or Alter-Scape in english
from June 10th to September 10th 2023. For this multi-faceted exhibition that took
almost four years to be shaped, he sets the task of showing reflections in which
various contemporary art questions are manifested in connection with the question:
''How to expand and remix the details of nature?''. To do this, artists express
themselves through digital sound and visual works, concerts and conferences. The
exhibition brings together artists active in different cultural institutions as teachers,
educators, philosophers, art historians and record sellers. Most of them publish on the
influential German record label Mille Plateaux, which has dedicated itself, since the
early 1990's, to post-techno electronic music and theorization. The events include
works by Marilou Lyonnais Archambault, Thomas Köner, Stefan Paulus, Myriam
Boucher, Achim Szepanski, Pheek and Automatisme. The theme is defined by the
sensitivity to natural landscapes and to their documentation. It takes the form of
interstices between the human and nature relations and mutual point of view. The
result is an imaginary space and another reality that constitutes the utopia of an
alternative, mixed and unreal nature. It offers an uncontrollable living-together
positioned between sublime and chaos; the purpose is to slow down time and to offer
a moment of naturalist reflection.