Upgrade! Paris: Art of Failure presents Corpus on the occasion of the “Corpus” exhibition opening :: January 7, 2010; 6:30 pm :: Théatre Molière - Scène d’Aquitaine / OARA, 33 rue du temple, Bordeaux, France.

Corpus is a set-up which uses sound, architecture and multimedia technology to stage objects, furniture, architecture or a place and set them into pulsating vibration. The various elements which compose the inherent identity of place thus become active or ‘living’ and breathe life into sounds specific to their personality. The selected place becomes the instrument on which the duo of musicians play, offering their audience a unique physical experience of place at once richly sensorial and other-worldly.

In December 2009, four different sound interventions were carried out using Corpus in sites around the Aquitaine region selected for their rich architectural qualities – the funicular in Pau, the pyramid at the School of Architecture in Bordeaux, the agricultural pole of Château Chasse-Spleen and the Maison Latapie.

Each Corpus project explores the inherent personality and specificities of the place selected and each concert and sound installation is rooted in detailed preliminary research. The audio-visual archives of the performances and genesis of each project will be presented during the exhibition at the OARA and are also accessible on line at our website.

During the conference marking the exhibition’s official opening, Art of Failure will look back over the development of Corpus from its inception with the GMEM in 2006 to the four installations and concerts held with the OARA in 2009. The duo will present the different versions of Corpus designed and developed over this period, its building blocks and underlying tenets and the successive mutations the project has undergone at the complex crossroads of sound and architecture their work explores.

Art of Failure is a duo of French artists - Nicolas Maigret and Nicolas Montgermont. Their work is fueled by their love of the ground-breaking experimentations of the historical avant-garde and by scientific and aesthetic innovation generally. They like to establish transpositions between genres and seemingly unrelated fields, or explore the tipping points where, for example, abstract concepts may find their expression in the plastic arts, where geological data may be transformed into a record or where medical information technology may be used to perform a concert. These transgressions and oversteppings of limits shed new light on the inherent characteristics and aesthetic qualities of the technology so prevalent in our contemporary world. Their work takes on a variety of guises – performances, installations, on-line projects or published scores.