Jean-Pierre Gauthier (b. 1965, Canada)
Thorax, 2010

Lately, I’ve been crawling closer and closer to sound sculpture (in the more physically solid sense of the word than just sound waves sculpting the space). I am making stuff that I envision to become carriers of sound in the future – by help of exciters, transducers or gravity or whatever. An Arduino kit has been hiding in my drawer for months waiting for the right moment and mental space…

Gauthier’s works are reminding me of how those different bits and pieces I am doing or thinking of doing might be connecting at some future date… I like these things of unclear identity – assemblages that are too weird to be something recognisable yet too purposeful and too entangled to be totally random… and it does not hurt that they can mix various media – visual, sonic, kinetic, digital, interactive… I think I am moving towards that kind of unidentifiable presence…

Thorax, working with movements of air, has also other associative cords connecting to my past projects focusing on air in different ways – from my air “jewellery” made of silicon piping meant to channel-share-divide air in beautifully controlled pathways, to recordings of wind, to my experimental “breathing choir” and other recordings of body sounds.