Contreformes, Ligne A

With Étienne Boulanger

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As he kindly gives a listening experience which had previously only been nature’s, Thomas Tilly/Tô creates a sound installation which makes it possible to listen to an uncertain composition made up of sounds of two different types, taken from inside and outside the tramway. On the one hand, the magnetic field created by the tramway’s movement is transformed into audible sounds and diverted back inside the train through a series of loudspeakers fixed to the ceiling. When the tramway stops, the sounds die down. On the other hand, the sound floods generated by the city in the surroundings of three stops (Les Aulnaies, Croix Saint-Marceau and Zénith) come on top of the moving tramway’s sounds when one gets closer to the stops (about a hundred meters away) and gradually get the upper-hand when the magnetic fields vanish. With such a device, the train becomes a listening lounge and an autonomous musical printing system which creates a piece on the spur of the moment ; one can perceive those outside noises we are usually protected from, along with the movement of the tramway’s mechanism and maybe too, a feeling of awkwardness and fascination, as if we were listening to its heartbeats. Thomas Tilly/ Tô provides us with supranatural tools, with ears that can pick up the infrasonic vibrations also provided with a long-hearing ability (very similar to these telescopes, the appendixes of eyes which aren’t powerful enough). Superheroes of the everyday, we anticipate the future, and we disintegrate into the infra-thin. Camille de Singly