FRGMENTS

Julien Bayle

With FRGMENTS, Julien Bayle pursues new strategies within his artistic process and deviates from his own convention. Until now, linear structures and essentially reduced geometrical elements dominated the work of Julien Bayle, without offering even the smallest narrative moment.

Bayle shows another side of his artistic work within FRGMENTS, which nonetheless establishes a clear reference to his previous work in terms of its execution, the underlying technologies and the relevant aesthetics, but still implies something completely different. Real existing persons were a priori filmed, then in an continuous audio-visual flow, the resulting videos are fragmented, reconstructed and assembled into new images and sound material.

The process is defined by a complex code, which feeds on the video matrix and is- depending on metric, measure, time and repetition – structuring newly obtained fragments, parts and recombines them, into a new visual output.</p> <p>As a result, the merged generated elements merge form a new entity whose substantial properties are unexpected time loops, amorphous face hybrids and recontextualised space shifts.

The specific and condensed narrative on the one hand, can operate completely autonomously (installation version), and on the other hand, be externally influenced (live performance version).

Bayle refers to the Cut-Up technique, developed by Brion Gysin and Willian S. Burroughs, but uses it in a rather rudimentary adapted method. From a strictly predetermined reference scenario, which is deduced by the systematic and under exactly defined conditions prerecorded video material, it is no longer the person who holds the immediate artistic, inventive energy: The creative genius becomes replaced by a computer-generated, decisive apparatus enters and generates a complete time- and space-related audiovisual being.

The genesis of fragmented video sequences and occasional occurring flashes of light, collides in the further course with specially developed sound structures that oscillate between barely perceptible and the limit of tolerable intensity. The sound expands within the processing through to a complete appropriation of space and physique. The musical understanding fluctuates between intended composition and sonorous chaos, at whose interference zones the spatialization of sounds can be experienced.

FRGMENTS appeals and stimulates multiple senses. It explores perception as a direct phenomenon and corrupts it. The project seeks to establish a moment of immediacy, from which a more differentiated experience of individuality and humanity can emerge.

For some time now, Bayle has been exploring sensory perceptions of the human being, seemingly using his own introspection as an impulse to generate an extrinsic experience which unites the inner confrontation with visual-psychological aspects in his latest work.