Preamble
In the tales, the forest is an ambivalent and mysterious place. Quiet, secret, deep, the forest is a place of strange meetings, of evil spells and enchantments. Closed space it brings back the man to his origins, its roots.
The forests, with their gloomy characters caused in our ancestor’s spirit a sacred feeling. The arborescent plants were adored as divinities.
* Alsos means sacred wood in Greek. It was made of the sanctuaries healers, with the fountain, the portico of incubation, and the theatre.
The forest, if it is not any more the theatre of fantastic adventures, symbolizes however for the modern man, the unconscious one, the secret share which he carries in him. The terrors lived in the forest would represent the fear of the unconscious revelation.
Description
This artwork exists thanks to the presence and the participation of the spectator. They each other creates a common work.
The clearing is an intimist space for meetings with collective walker’s intervention. The spectator, a flashlight in hand, is guided by a luminous stony path and penetrates into a space plunged into darkness. Mystic forest music immerses him in a strange universe. He discovers and explores this space by pointing his lamp on the walls, the vegetation and surrounding space. At the hearth of a fantastic forest it lights a strange vegetation of luminescent plants.
The black light transforms space and changes perceptions. The universe remind us the imaginary and fantastic forests described in the tales.
The fluorescent flowers dispersed in the branches react to the luminous flows modifications. They camouflaged light sensors in their pistil. Those which transmit the luminous impulses and variations to a data-processing program. In return, a dissimulated computer analyses data and plays the melody generated with the movements of the lights. Each flower connected to distinct sonorities enables it to generate a complex acousmatic universe.
Alsos* installation was born with the idea to combine nature and technology. We are interested in the random relation related to the data flow as well as the sound interaction. We approach here a treatment, a modification of the data related to the movement of the spectators in the artwork via the generation of luminous impulses.
The gestures and the movements of the spectators will make it possible to generate sound flows and musical universes like apprentices musicians.
This not controlled generation, near to random, will give us here the illusion of living artwork.
