The region of the lake of Geneva served as a secluded retreat for numerous visual artists working with sound. Exchanges with local initiatives (like the group “ecart”) and artists led to collaborations and resulted in the creation of diverse artists’ records over the years. The local scene benefited considerably from this input and could, in return, build an extensive and stable network. 

Aside from producing a printed anthology, some vinyl records, and a web-platform, the project also studies the ambiguity of the relationships between the current technological context, oriented towards dematerialization, and the persistence of sound practices distributed on tangible recording media. It was, therefore, essential to rely on analog, durable formats, and at the same time to evaluate and to find open and hybrid formats, avoiding empirical and secondhand blindspots. These nonhierarchical solutions should be interactive, permitting the possibility of adding content on a highly networked basis while being extensible and easily modifiable. The different parts are intended to be tightly interwoven, building a complex entity without ranked-order parts, based on a dynamic and recursive common reflection process. The chosen methodology, like the tools developed to experiment with it, has as its primary quality plasticity and adaptation to changes in direction, as well as the ability to include disparate types of objects and materials, people, and organizations according to distinct levels of contributions and at different stages of the research. It allows jumps in time and space, different levels of inter-connections, different types of relationships and actors, and the integration of individual perspectives and collective discourse. They allow us to understand the forms of cooperation and production specific to our living history. 

Is it possible to structure entirely new vectors of meaning with these tools? Are we able to access and to integrate the knowledge of a broader group of interested parties?

See the researche projet "A-Sides - Audio editions by artists"