Madame Ose

Around 2002 and 2003, I was exploring new functions in one of my favourite applications (Studio Artist: https://synthetik.com).
This is a very powerful application, it mostly caters to the people who (merely) manipulate existing content (what I have called “visual karaoke”: http://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=680) but it also packs a real punch for those who want to create original content (as in “simply doing”) and not merely manipulate content often created by others (as in “doing something with”).
I had (still do) the good fortune of having the Studio Artist creator, John Dalton, willing to implement functions in his massive application which could facilitate what I was beginning to explore (especially in what was new to me as a painter, the time dimension).
I did a gazillion number of sketches, some of which were the starting point of really interesting (to me at least) pieces.
This sketch is one of them, set to the music of the French composer René Aubry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Aubry), just an exercise to test some ways of dealing with image making dealing with time.
That is also when I started collaborating with Thierry Van Roy (http://www.menuhin-foundation.com/thierry-van-roy/), and much of our collaboration (https://vimeo.com/showcase/2985471) was based on a form of exchange that I have been enjoying since with other musicians as well: first I create an image sequence structured (tightly or loosely) by music I pick (or even “assemble” from bits, as in https://vimeo.com/50778726 and https://vimeo.com/46068202), then I send that video, silenced, to my collaborator(s). New music/audio is then created for that video, sometimes more than one (as with Jean Derome https://actuellecd.com/en/artiste/derome_je/Jean_Derome, see two examples of that work here: https://vimeo.com/67142233 and https://vimeo.com/67131024).
And that exchange, related to the Surrealists' "cadavre exquis”, does not stop there: I may then take the music/audio that was created for the silenced initial video and create new images for it, then send that new video, again silenced, to the musician(s), and continue that exploration.

That is basically how my first NFB movie, “Liaisons”, was made: https://vimeo.com/215064941

But back to this sketch, “Madame Ose”: Thierry Van Roy took the silenced video and had two amazing French artists do their thing (voice improvisation) while viewing it.
What Patrick Guionnet and Laurent Garcia did to/for it is nothing short of amazing, and Thierry's skills (he’s an audio engineer by trade) produced splendid recordings which were then edited in equally amazing ways.
Thierry sent me two versions of the sound track, they gave birth in 2005 to “Madame Ose Arras 1” (https://vimeo.com/25977179) and "Madame Ose Arras 2” (https://vimeo.com/155709259).

The above should give those interested a bit of a insight into the processes I enjoy.