at the heart of the Rotunda lies an expansive basin, eighteen meters in diameter, filled with water\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n
\t\t<\/p>\n
DB: The title clinamen refers to the random motion of atoms in Epicurean physics. How does this idea connect to the movement and behavior of the installation?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n CBM:<\/strong> Clinamen, this word and its definition came to me in the summer of 1997, as I was leafing through the pages of a dictionary. I was looking for a title for my new installation that would describe the principle of the work. I had the word declination in mind and was looking for a synonym here and there. The cosmic connotations of clinamen immediately captivated me and I found many analogies between the phenomenon it describes and my work in progress. So I adopted the title. Shortly afterwards, in view of the installation\u2019s appearance, the title clinamen seemed a little pretentious, and for the work\u2019s first exhibition I called it untitled. In the years that followed, untitled enjoyed great success in France and abroad in many different versions. Around 2003, production of the inflatable swimming pool model I had been using came to an abrupt halt. I had to design my installations with floating porcelain by having raised floors made into which one or more round pools could be integrated. Later, for exhibitions in vast spaces without walls, the raised floor took the form of a platform with access ramps and surrounded by circular benches, virtually acting as walls. As versions of the installation became larger and more planispheric, I decided in 2012 to rename the largest of them clinamen.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation. For materialists, the clinamen is the minimum angle that leads atoms, those inseparable and eternal particles, to collide and assemble to produce, by aggregation, all the perishable matter of our world, which constantly disintegrates and reformates : atoms are to matter what the letters of the alphabet are to language and writing, and it is from the variety of their combination that everything exists. In my work, there is also a curved movement that leads the cells represented by the porcelain bowls to collide, producing a world of sounds and potentially all the occurrences of the elements present. We can contemplate clinamen installation as a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears. But if you try to trace the causal thread of a sequence, it\u2019s impossible to do it live. In other words, if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.<\/p>\n image \u00a9 designboom<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n DB: The piece is guided by invisible currents, where ceramic bowls create sound through chance encounters. How do you work with unpredictability as part of your creative process?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n CBM:<\/strong> I discovered the virtues of unpredictability for my music the day I accepted that outside sounds, totally unrelated to my own, such as those of the urban environment of the unspoilt place where I was producing my music, could mix with it and enrich it. Later, during a play by the company whose music I was composing, which was being staged on the roof of a campus building, the sounds of cars in the distance or the sound of the wind could be heard. The sounds of cars in the distance or voices, wind, planes passing in the sky and crows flying overhead mixed with my music for a noisy string quartet and reanimated it. It was all a question of sound levels and permanence of course, but it gave a \u201chere and now\u201d quality to my recorded and broadcast music. Later, I often used microphones to pick up sounds live outside theatres, reinjecting them and mixing them with my music. These experiences opened my ears and gradually led me to think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.<\/p>\n ceramic bowls drift across the water surface, propelled by gentle currents<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n DB: Your choice of materials\u2014porcelain bowls, water, currents\u2014feels deliberately elemental. What draws you to these fragile, mutable mediums?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n CBM:<\/strong> One day, Jack, a friend of mine who\u2019s a piano maker, said to me: the piano is a collection of different materials \u2013 metal, wood, felt, glue, etc. \u2013 which can be dangerous to each other, and which are also subject to phenomenal mechanical tensions capable of destroying them. Fortunately, the ingenious arrangement of these materials results in an almost living object that only awaits the tension of the pianist\u2019s nervous system to become the alter ego of the player. image \u00a9 designboom<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n DB: You\u2019ve described sound as a \u2018living material.\u2019 How do you approach sound, not just as music, but as something sculptural, spatial, and physical ?<\/strong><\/p>\n \nCBM:<\/strong> Rather, my systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms. As I relate with the harmonicaos work and the use of tuners immersed in a form of hesitation or doubt that I notice and exploit to thwart forms of off-putting repetition.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n DB: There\u2019s a tension in clinamen\u2014between order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. How do you see these opposites coexisting in your work ?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s funny, towards the end of the nineties, I called an installation harmonichaos. It consists of thirteen silent vacuum cleaners, each of which plays a small diatonic harmonica, whose tonality, or tuning of the vacuumed notes, is different from the twelve other harmonicas. The operation and shutdown of each vacuum\/harmonica module depends on a frequency analyzer built into the module. This is a chromatic tuner used by musicians to tune their instruments. It accurately identifies the sound frequency of a single note at a time, but its analysis becomes more than uncertain as soon as the device detects several notes or a chord simultaneously. The device reacts to surrounding sounds, hesitates, contradicts itself \u2026 image \u00a9 designboom<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n DB: Your installations often invite the audience into a sensory, open-ended experience. What role does the visitor play in activating or completing the work?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n CBM:<\/strong> When you visit an exhibition, aren\u2019t you yourself sensitive to the presence of other visitors? If they give you the impression of not knowing why they\u2019re there? It can be funny, but it can also be pathetic. If they only look at the works through their cameras or smartphones, and step back without paying attention to the other visitors to frame a masterpiece, I think that\u2019s awful. With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence. When I succeed in doing this, I find it makes people more beautiful\u2026 I\u2019ve also noticed that when I compose the spaces of my installations using circles or curves, it makes visitors\u2019 trajectories more harmonious and their wandering more fluid than in orthogonal spaces. The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n DB: In an age of speed and distraction, how do you see your work offering space for slowness, attention, and contemplation?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n CBM:<\/strong> I don\u2019t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today\u2019s world, I don\u2019t presume to know what anyone needs, but since I\u2019m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.\t\n\t<\/p>\n image \u00a9 designboom<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n \t\t<\/p>\n project info:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n name:<\/strong> clinamen<\/p>\n artist:<\/strong> C\u00e9leste Boursier-Mougenot | @celesteboursiermougenot<\/a><\/p>\n curator:<\/strong> Emma Lavigne, Chief Curator and General Director of the Pinault Collection<\/p>\n location:<\/strong> Bourse de Commerce \u2014 Pinault Collection<\/a>, 2 rue de Viarmes, 75001, Paris, France | @boursedecommerce<\/a><\/p>\n dates:<\/strong> June 5th \u2013 September 21st, 2025<\/p>\n The post c\u00e9leste boursier-mougenot turns bourse de commerce into immersive aquatic soundscape<\/a> appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" an Immersive aquatic soundscape at THE Bourse de Commerce \u00a0 The Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris transforms into a mesmerizing aquatic and musical landscape with the unveiling of clinamen, an immersive installation … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[142],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nFor my part, it was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe (inflatable pool, soft plastic, glass, porcelain, water, pump, electricity, heating element, etc.) that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago. In the field of art and installation, any object can be considered according to criteria that no longer have anything to do with its functionality.<\/p>\n
\nObserving this, I thought that a logic other than the one for which the device had been designed was at work, because the time division seemed \u201calive\u201d to me. It was only a short step from there to imagining a specific form of life. I used the device because of its unreliability. With harmonichaos, it\u2019s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner\/harmonica module or another. Each module interacts with the twelve others in the ensemble ad libitum. What\u2019s more, this low-tech system is disrupted by variations in the voltage of the electrical network feeding it, making any attempt at prediction even more highly improbable.<\/p>\n