iconslip | Chaumont 2oo9

The visual device called “Timeslip” produced by the programmer and visual artist Antoine Schmitt, was a work linking us in real time to the information put out by AFP. The work transmitted it stage by conjugating it with the future… This performance was held during the research and creation workshops organized at Chaumont by the Sound Track company. The workshops were open to the public, proposing research projects, improvised programmes and meetings between visual artists and sound artists.

In response, Malte Martin formulated a visual liaison. Drawing from the language of prefabricated pictograms, he remixed iconographic monsters, echoing the oracle of “Timeslip”. He developed a cutting device. He divided the signs into easily identifiable halves. He put them side by side to follow Antoine Schmitt’s discourse, in a frenzied procession to the sustained beat of the musical production, it too played live, by Patricia Dallio and Jérôme Soudan, sound artists. In tandem, he also got to grips with another kind of ready-to-watch, ready-to-understand. By assembling the pictogram halves, he came up with something ready-to-think-about in a short-circuited movement of food-for-thought. By marrying two banal things, he concocted an unusual abridgement, between two unexpected poles. He thus offered us a new figure which Tristan Tzara, the grand master of the literary exercise, would without any doubt have envied him for — in the sphere of the image.