Seulement is the solo project of Mathieu Arsenault, an electronic musician and audiovisual artist from Montreal. His work explores the imperfections of the human body in our era of technological perfection. More specifically, he is interested in the integration and transformation of the human voice and gesture in digital arts. First known as the lead singer of the electronic rock band Technical Kidman, his solo practice now extends toaudiovisual performances, as well as albums and experimental films.
–
Bricolage Architecture is an audiovisual performance that combines stop-motion animation and live modular synthesis. It features minimal, hyper-flickering geometric abstractions reminiscent of computer-generated images. The difference being that they are all handmade using cardboard cutouts photographed on a light tablet. Aside from editing and cropping, no digital processing is applied to the photos. They are shown as they were taken, without concealing the imperfections in their lines, the tears in the cardboard, and the imprecisions in their movements. Rather than using purely electronic sounds, the music also opts for a more physical approach. It is constructed from snippets of recordings of my own voice that are transformed live using the modular synthesizer. To simplify my approach, we could say that I use my hands to create shapes that mimic digital imagery and that I use my voice to produce sounds that resemble electronic synthesis. By imitating technological processes with the body, the performance seeks to incorporate the human gesture back into the digital arts practices which tend more and more towards depersonalization.
–
Pushing the body to imitate what the machine can perfectly execute generates imperfections in both sound and image. However, the tears in the paper and the trembling of the voice are exactly what the performance attempts to highlight. This process induces a human feel to sounds and images we more often associate with a digital aesthetic. In this way, Bricolage Architecture creates a tension between the irregularities of the human gesture and the systematic execution of the machine. It questions the position of the “imperfect” human body in our world of so-called “technological perfection”.