WINNING PROJECT 2025 OF THE CALL FOR PROJECTS RESEARCH IN THEATER AND ASSOCIATED ARTS OF THE DGCA - GENERAL DIRECTORATE OF ARTISTIC CREATION.
Listening to objects: developing techno-hacked sound assemblies in the service of new relational imaginaries is a research-creation project led by Cie La Boîte à sel (Céline Garnavault and Thomas Sillard). It focuses on designing sound and robotic artifacts whose gestures – offbeat, accidental, sometimes recalcitrant – escape mastery. These unexpected alterities become the driving force of unprecedented relationships between artists, audiences, and objects.
Through workshops in France and Quebec, the team will build about ten sound robotic objects and experiment with their behaviors. The objective is twofold: to give life to techno-hacked objects with ambiguous reactions and to catalog relational processes that allow for imagining other forms of complicity, intimacy, or cooperation between humans and machines.
The main restitution will take the form of the Manual of Oblique Listening for Infinite Machines, a repertoire of processes and strategies that can be activated by other artists. This initiative will be led by researchers Dinaïg Stall (UQAM) and Julie-Michèle Morin (ULaval). Made available to the academic and artistic community, it will be published as an interactive digital file. The project is supported by L’Hectare, Espace Jéliote, the 3T of Châtellerault, LABLAB in Lyon, as well as the FORMES research group at UQAM. This research will also benefit from the collaboration of researcher Emma Merabet.