Simone Provencher

Simone Provencher is a multi-instrumentalist and improviser who has been active in the experimental music community for several years. She first made her name with the French post-punk band VICTIME, with whom she has been performing for the past five years. In 2021, she began a more exploratory approach, focusing more on improvisation and releasing “Mesures” on Michel Records, and “Album”, the result of a collaboration with Hull-based percussionist and producer Olivier Fairfield.

Parallelly, she pursues projects with a media arts approach, obtaining a grant from the City of Gatineau for her project “Nouvelle observation”, in which she works on the sonification of video signals using custom-made synthesizers. She is currently continuing the development of new tools through her residency at DAÏMÔN.

“Nouvelle observation” is a process of sonorization of video signals. Using software designed for the visually impaired, a camera’s field of view is translated into audio, the clearer pixels in the image become powerful sounds, the black, silence; all with a fascinating stereophony. New observation allows the artist to manipulate the generated sounds, taking them away from a direct translation of the image and making them more malleable, abstract. From this interaction a system emerges where the camera becomes the main instrument of the music generated, fingers in front of the lens create silent contrasts and the lights projected on the wall trigger a swarm of oscillators. The angles and shots of the camera are repeated on the wall, in “feedback”; the captured space becomes more and more constructed, unreal.
For this residency at DAÏMÔN, the objective is to refine the systems and programming and to add some lights, also controlled by the camera data; thus dynamically changing the captured image and adding yet another structure in reiteration.

Simone will be giving an artist talk and presenting her work on November 9Th 2022 at 7PM.

Click here for more details about the artist talk.