Jean-Francois Charles

On March 15th, I drove to Pittsburgh for the 52nd annual conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. I had the great pleasure to collaborate with ceramists Andrew Casto and Evan D'Orazio , as well as Engineering Professor Stephen Baek . We collaborated for the exhibition What We Made Sounds Like This , which presented ceramic pieces with live sonification. Exhibition in Pittsburgh during the NCECA 2018 conference Andrew Casto's Assemblage 158 From my notebook A core idea was to generate sounds from the negative space of the pieces. To this end, we inhabited the empty space around the 3D scanned pieces with 27 balls, which bounced around or inside the objects. The distance and position of each ball drove in real time a sound synthesis engine. The three engines in Ceramix : physics simulation, visualization, and sound synthesis Behind the scenes: live parameters in Max We took part to a panel presentation on March 16th: that was a gre...

Last year, I told you about the Metallum installation : a ritual toupin , with imaginary echoes sent back by the rock faces of my native mountains. Here is a short video: Link: Metallum on youtube .

You are invited to this exhibition organized by the Touanen family in the French Alps near Evian. Johann is a photographer, Anne-Marie creates poetic natural & mechanical boxes, Élise is a graphic artist, Peggy is a collagist, Freddy recounts traditional & original Alpine stories, Suzanne bakes singular chocolate cakes, and I'm not even mentioning all contributing artists! I am taking part with an installation entitled Metallum , and with a multimedia setting of Freddy's books, including Les Mystères de la Montagne . The exhibition is open until Saturday, 7 p.m.

Coming in July 2015: Metallum is an interactive alpine cow bell ( toupin ). Necessary to a successful emmontagnée , the toupin is interpreted here as the alpine equivalent of Asian percussions, such as the Japanese singing bowl (rin gong), or the Chinese opera cymbals. A ritual bell, which sounds like a call to imagination and like an echo sent back by the rock faces of my native mountains. A queen & her toupin... Picture from 20min.ch