INTERVIEW WITH CÉLINE GARNAVAULT AND THOMAS SILLARD
Can you pitch BAD BLOCK in 1 minute flat?
Bad block is an extraordinary work for a small community of spectators. An ever-changing hybrid experience, blending sound arts, puppet arts, new magic, immersion, interactivity, and theater. The audience enters an acousmonium, which is an orchestra of loudspeakers, and is invited to sit down. Each person is given a block – which can be defined as an augmented puppet – that will accompany them throughout the performance. At first, they expect to attend a concert of connected sound objects.
The show begins with the listening of an immersive sound piece broadcasted by the 104 loudspeakers present, with astonishing and dynamic spatialization that plunges the spectators directly into a cosmic universe. Gradually, the spectators are invited to manipulate the objects to co-create soundscapes and musical parts. Then, the blocks begin to come to life and interact with each other. The boundary between humans and objects becomes increasingly porous as the blocks start to respond to them and gain their independence... The magic then happens: through play and attentive listening to the objects, new relationships are woven between the spectators and the blocks!
It is both disconcerting – as it is hard to understand how all this works! – and poetic. Gently, without ever being forced, the audience and the objects gradually form a small assembly: a joyful and attentive community whose exchanges often last well beyond the performance time!
BAD BLOCK, why this title?
Because it is the name of the objects we created. This term refers to various things, depending on the meaning we want to give them: construction game pieces, cubes, parts of a whole...
BAD, because what fascinates us in our research is working on the relationship to what the essayist Emanuele Quinz calls “behavioral objects.” These are objects to which we attribute life, autonomy, and which are all the more alive when they resist, act in unexpected ways, challenge us, and engage us in ways that are sometimes burlesque, sometimes unsettling.
For example, the central computer HAL 9000 that does not want to be turned off in “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick. Or the microphone and the chair that resist in Norman McLaren's short films “There Was a Chair” - 1947 and “Norman McLaren's Welcome Speech” - 1964. Or the undulating pipe in “My Uncle” by Jacques Tati as well as the tire in “rubber” by Quentin Dupieux.
What makes this show unique in France?
We have invented a completely new device that allows for the simultaneous control of a hundred autonomous wireless sound and light objects, enabling both multi-diffusion of sound, visualizing it by drawing its movements in space through the synchronous lights of the objects, but also holding it physically in one’s hands and acting on it live, whether one is an artist or an audience member. This is a true technical feat.
We are developing this new scenic dramaturgical language, technological but also puppetry, magical, and resolutely theatrical and artisanal, without any artificial intelligence to generate the interactions. We set a framework, with a script and rules of the game, but each experience will be different as we improvise live with the audiences.
Of the 104 blocks in the device, it should be imagined that 50 are real characters that will interact live and independently with each other but also with a different spectator at each performance! Technology is intertwined with magical tricks and artifices that we will not reveal to keep an element of mystery...
With techno-hacked objects on stage, can we still talk about live performance?
With about fifty spectators participating in the performance, one performer on stage leading the game, and a whole team behind, we are more than ever in live performance!
The blocks are indeed technological objects, but they are primarily tools, and what we choose to create with these tools is dialogue, emotion. These objects will indeed connect us with each other, and the performance includes moments of exchange and expression from the audience that are an integral part of its writing. The exchanges often continue well after the performance.
And during BAD BLOCK, one quickly understands that the “living” is not only where one imagines it to be. Observing how the audience gradually becomes attentive to their block, cautious, surprised by its reactions, awakening their capacity for wonder and empathy, one gets the impression that these objects also take on their share of humanity.
The SF author and essayist Alain Damasio speaks of improbability as a singularity of human creation, which distinguishes it from machine creation that always seeks the term most likely to be used mathematically. And this resonates strongly with BAD BLOCK, which is a performance where, certainly, the objects/machines are at the center, but in which we choose to inscribe intuition, randomness, and collective intelligence - which operates through the bouncing of imaginations off one another - at the heart of the experience with the audiences.
Ultimately, this theater populated with techno-hacked sound objects disrupts our usual references and our relationship to performance and technology and opens a space for collective reflection on these subjects. And above all, BAD BLOCK frees itself from the usual narrative framework: the performance pulls a thread connecting each spectator for more than an hour. We, too, the team behind, do not always know in advance what will happen at each new performance!
You place a great emphasis on research in your work, how long did the creation of BAD BLOCK take?
One must imagine that we make the blocks ourselves from A to Z! Our first research laboratory around this project started in 2020, but we would say that BAD BLOCK is the result of our experiments since we met in 2016. Before it, the blocks had already been the subject of a performance (BLOCK), but which did not go as far in interactions and immersion.
This project is also part of a long-term collaboration with a French researcher, Emma Mérabet, who works on the question of “de-anthropocentric” scenes. We also collaborate with two researchers across the Atlantic: the Franco-Canadian artist Dinaïg Stall and the Canadian Julie Michèle Morin through the newly created FORMES laboratory in Montreal, which studies processes, relationships, and puppet forms. With them, we are conducting research work: “Listening to Objects.”
Creating ecosystems populated with living sound objects and humans, placing the relationship, empathy, and listening at the center of our projects to invent new forms of collaboration, and to experiment with a theater of affective resonance: this is a precious engine for imagining our performances of tomorrow! Thomas's latest creation: “LA TÊTE,” a geek song tour for a machine that is half tire, half punk, and its 9 robotic choristers, which will be on tour in the 25/26 season.
STATEMENT OF INTENT
Revisiting sensations
BAD BLOCK invites humans to revisit their sensations and to let themselves be surprised by the place that their interiority, intimacy, and imagination can take in this collective experience.
Tools of relationship and empathy, mirrors of our humanities
Our blocks were initially designed to spatialize sound and manipulate it infinitely, which in itself is already an exciting research project. But it was during our first laboratories with the audiences that we discovered how much these small sound objects, in addition to their poetic and suggestive potential, imposed themselves as tools of relationship, sharing, and empathy. Through our experiences, we observed humans experiencing an unprecedented relationship with the autonomous objects entrusted to them. A singular experience resonating with the intimacy and personality of each, amidst the equally unique experiences of other participants. From these multiple experiences emerges a vibrant, generous community rich in complex emotions.
Contrary to what one might project onto these technological objects, cold, impersonal, and closed in on themselves, the blocks strongly stimulate the imagination. They are like paint or clay: they can represent anything. Unlike images that impose themselves, the images are born from the projections and imagination of the participants. Beyond their power of suggestion, the blocks are operators of relationship and openness to oneself, to others, to the world. Despite their appearance, they endow themselves with a true personality and come to solicit us at the point of our humanity.
What touches us in this theater of things? What are these objects charged with for a life to manifest in them? For us to attribute autonomy and intentionality to them, even for us to become attached to them? And what does all this say about us, humans?
A reversal of anthropocentrism
In the introduction to his essay entitled “The Behavior of Things” (2021), Emanuele Quinz addresses the question of the reversal of perspectives induced by the representation of “a world inhabited by other subjects than humans.”:
“At times, [the object] makes us forget its status, it suggests other possibilities. In the absence of believing it, we begin to doubt: can an inanimate object, under certain conditions, come to life? Can its movements, under certain conditions, become behaviors? In other words, can artifice, under certain conditions, become nature? All these questions force us into a reversal of perspective. This is precisely what is at stake in these complex ecosystems where the living and technology intertwine in relationships of resonance, similarity, interdependence, and where it becomes difficult to understand the chain of causes and effects: a subtle but radical reversal of anthropocentrism. By questioning the behavior of things, it is about considering how things question us.”
BAD BLOCK is part of this research that aims to create a reversal of perspectives in which humans are no longer at the center of the world and attention. By decentering, it allows a shift of gaze towards all that is alive and sensitive in our surroundings. With this change of perspective, humans are placed in an infinitely vaster world, where it is about making community with an expanded assembly of beings and things, human and non-human. A deeply animated world.
Behavioral object
The blocks fall into the category of behavioral objects defined by Emanuele Quinz in “The Behavior of Things”:
“Behavioral Objects are more than machines or automata, as their movements are interpreted as behaviors, evoking a form of autonomy, agency, intentionality. They are objects seen as subjects, machines seen as living beings.”
Regarding this “living” character of objects, he specifies:
“(...) it is not enough to have a movement, nor even a behavior, there must be a bad behavior [misbehavior], a deviation, a sidestep, a hesitation, a transgression, a form of strangeness that deviates from all logic. Only in this way does the object manage to conceal its nature as an artifact, to emancipate itself from its dependence, to become other. To become another – who faces the human, who escapes it, who challenges it.”
If the “Bad” of BAD BLOCK was initially a nod to a darker, adult version of our work with the blocks, it is now rather justified by this idea of emancipation and transgression of the object that, by behaving, objects to the human and their world.
Keeping the secret of the “living”
In BAD BLOCK, the objects gradually take the floor, dialogue with their humans, and shift from the status of object to that of “living” entities. To create this effect of life, we rely on the principles of theatrical convention, and more particularly on puppet and object theater, in which the audience chooses to voluntarily adhere to this “illusion,” and on technical tricks. Regarding these tricks, we choose - just like in new magic or mentalism - to maintain the secret and disclose nothing to preserve the pleasure of doubt and disturbance and maintain surprise for future participants.
SF thrills
“In its finest accomplishment, the SF genre combines ruthless logic with effervescent imagination. And it is thus that it raises the desire for another framework of thought, reminding us that this world where many dystopias have materialized is not the only possible one. That we can diverge. That there is no fatality, and that tearing apart illusions is a prerequisite for the invention of other values, other systems to imagine...” Evelyne Pieiller - Le Monde Diplomatique - Manière de voir - “Science fiction, eagerly tomorrow?”
BAD BLOCK does not primarily address themes such as human-machine hybridity, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, destruction, or the machine's takeover of humans. That said, we embrace a certain ambivalence in the process since Bad Block plays with the codes of science fiction and so-called “genre” films in the choice of climates that succeed one another. Indeed, by relying on a common cultural foundation that contributes to the construction of a collective imagination, conscious or not, we seek for the audience to recognize signs, references - markers in short - allowing them to receive everything that will be more abstract and disconcerting in the proposal.
The game
BAD BLOCK is an invitation to play, with the device and with others, and to observe what the game provokes, triggers, and calls forth within oneself.
Performances as microcosms
In our work, we position ourselves with the intention of cultivating an ethics of relationship, a reflection on the need to be and act together, in sharing and joy. Our performances and installations seek to create small protected ecosystems, suspended times, in proximity, where encounters can take place and thought can unfold.
