Originally from Britain, I arrived in France in 1980. I enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes (now the École Supérieure d’Art de Nîmes), where, from the very beginning, my interest focused on the relationship between sound and the visual arts, culminating in the production of musical machines. I presented these sound sculptures in exhibitions, performances, and concerts. During these formative years, I was particularly influenced by the discovery of artistic movements for which questioning the “traditional” boundaries between disciplines is a key characteristic. These include Dadaism, Futurism, and Fluxus, and the forms associated with them, such as performance art, happenings, and experimental music. These movements all tended to include the notion of the everyday as an alternative to the established or institutionalized work. Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto, ¹⁾, became the starting point for my personal conception of sound art (sound art not being clearly established as a discipline in the 1980s). John Cage’s definition of experimental music (creating music to be heard, rather than writing music that one already hears in one’s head)²⁾became a key reference for establishing my working method.

I obtained my DNSEP (MA) in 1985 with a distinction “for the successful integration of sculpture and sound,” and I was fortunate enough to be awarded an artist residency at the Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. This eight-month stay provided me with an ideal transition between art school and professional practice. For two years after graduating, I performed with what I called The Orchestra, an ensemble of about twenty musical machines made from recycled objects and controlled from a kind of console. I played solo or in duos with jazz musicians such as Jean-Marc Padovani and Glenn Ferris.

I also collaborated with Claude Barthélemy, who later became the director of the Orchestre National de Jazz. During this collaboration, he invited me and my machines to play in unusual ensembles for which he composed original pieces. We presented concerts in venues such as the Ancienne Ferme du Buisson and the Grande Halle de la Villette. I owe much of my musical knowledge and my taste for stage experimentation to Claude Barthélemy.

My work as an artist continued to evolve throughout the following decade. I continued producing sound machines and self-contained installations, which I exhibited in France and elsewhere in Europe, while also directing the production of several larger-scale creations such as: Beau Comme Un Camion (a construction truck transformed into a mobile musical machine); Une Heure d’Entrainement (a performance involving a team of bodybuilders exercising on musical machines – a work co-created with Jean Claude Gagnieux); Cosy Disco – Centre d’Art (a caravan/mobile disco hosting artist performances, concerts, and other musical events, commissioned by the DRAC Languedoc-Roussillon); and John et La Fée Électrique (a “pop operetta” bringing together musicians, performers, and robotic machines). With these productions, I experimented with different artistic and cultural environments, consequently involving a variety of approaches to the audience(s).

Gradually, I incorporated more sophisticated technologies, and in the early 1990s, I began to control mechanical and robotic devices using the MIDI (Machine Audio Computer) language. In John and the Electric Fairy, the stage actions relied on the simultaneous control of mechanical movements and electronic sounds by performers equipped with MIDI instruments. The project opened up a field of research exploring the ambiguous relationship between humans and machines. The semi-automated device both dominated and amplified the actions of the human performers, from both a physical and symbolic perspective. The sonification of the industrial-looking machinery transformed its operation into a burlesque fiction. I was beginning to take an interest in the artistic possibilities offered by computer programming and, in 1995, I trained myself in the Max MSP programming language. This gave me a sufficient degree of autonomy to write my own audio programs, a practice I continue to use today.

Je commençais à m’intéresser aux possibilités artistiques offertes par la programmation informatique et, en 1995, je me formais au langage informatique Max MSP . J’acquis ainsi un degré d’autonomie suffisant pour écrire mes propres programmes audios, une pratique que je continue d’exploiter aujourd’hui.

In 1996, I was awarded the prestigious Villa Medici residency program. “Hors les murs” for a residency in the United States. I spent the first half of my residency in New York City, where I prepared an installation for the “Out of Doors” Festival at Lincoln Center. I was then welcomed as an artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, where I produced a new version of the performance for bodybuilders, One Hour of Training, re-titled Musical Body Building. Here, I used sensors attached to the bodybuilders’ bodies and to their weight lifting machines, connected to programs written to sonify the workout.

It was during this period that I met the New York artist G.H. Hovagimyan. A fruitful collaboration began that would last for more than a decade. While this partnership required numerous transatlantic trips, it also took advantage of the new possibilities offered by the internet. Indeed, this period coincided with the pioneering era of the internet, and we embraced this new communication space with enthusiasm. Our collaboration depended on and was fueled by our experiments with internet technologies. We developed a practice that explored the possibilities offered by the web, both as a tool and as an aesthetic device. With Rant/Rant Back, for example, we created a performance during which G.H., in his New York apartment, while drinking his morning coffee, ranted about the day's news. Meanwhile, on stage in Aix-en-Provence, I sampled and mixed his streamed words, sending them back to him. G.H. then responded to the transformed sound of his own voice, creating a kind of schizophrenic sound poetry, made of increasingly thick layers of echoes produced by internet latency.

My work shifted from mechanical systems and architectural spaces to computer routines and networked spaces. The laptop then became my working environment and, in some cases, the physical manifestation of the work. At that time, synthesized voices were developing with the idea that they represented the vocal medium of the future. We seized upon these strange voices to use them, literally, as the voices of our anthropomorphized and mobile computers. Intrigued by the extravagance of the fad surrounding artificial intelligence, through the books of Ray Kurzweil or articles in magazines such as Wired, I programmed our laptops to sing and dance with us on stage. They did this wearing plastic wigs and riding on remote-controlled toy cars for the performance *Exercises in Talking*. In another piece, A Soapopera For Imacs, four computers conversed with each other, thanks to their synthesized voices and the nascent technology of speech recognition. We presented these projects in New York, France, and elsewhere in Europe.

In the early 2000s, I also contributed to other collective initiatives. Founded in Marseille, where I was living at the time, DaisyChain was created in 2001 when Martine Robin invited me to exhibit at the Château de Servières, giving me carte blanche to invite other artists. Instead of envisioning a group exhibition where each artist would present their individual work, I preferred to propose to artists, engaged like myself in experimentation with new media, that they create a networked installation within the gallery space. The operating principle of this installation was as follows: each artist contributed an element of the installation, equipped with an input and an output, to create a kind of cadavre exquis (heads bodies and legs), a chain artwork, using data collected either directly on site (sounds, images, and interactions with the public) or remotely via the internet. Thus, visitors were first greeted by the face of GH Hovagimyan on a screen, live from NYC, asking them questions, collecting the sounds of their voices and their image. Then, while visiting the exhibition, these same visitors encountered these sounds and images, accumulated with others and manipulated through different interfaces.

The PacJap musical ensemble, born from a Franco-Japanese exchange project initiated by the AMI association, had already adopted the form of a laptop orchestra when I joined in 2001. The unique aspect of this orchestra was that all participants shared the same MIDI data, each interpreting it according to their own taste and largely using their own programs or patches created with MaxMSP. This principle had the dual advantage of addressing the near impossibility of communicating verbally, since we didn't speak the same language, and of creating a musical experience that was always synchronized and in some way coherent despite aesthetic and cultural differences.

Thus, for each musical piece, one member of the group would send MIDI data from an instrument, an interface, or software on their computer. The other members of the group, connected via a network, would receive and “interpret” it. The interpretation here lay in choosing which part of the data to use, its potential transformation (transposition or otherwise), and its assignment to the sounds. Drawing on my experience with DaisyChain, I fully participated in the development of this system, which we presented in concert at ISEA, Nagoya, Japan in 2002 and at the MIMI Festival in Marseille in 2003.

Through these few projects and many others (a complete description of all my artistic endeavors would be far too extensive here), I have developed a taste for experimenting with new media and emerging technologies. The dialogue (or perhaps the struggle) that the artist maintains with the material is all the more stimulating, in my view, because this material is constantly evolving, as is the case with computer technologies and programming. Indeed, the quest for the artistic possibilities hidden within emerging technologies has become a working method, gradually leading me towards the creative-research approach I apply today.

In 1994, I was recruited as a teacher by the École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence (ESA Aix). Although I had taught at other art schools at various times since completing my studies, ESA Aix particularly appealed to me because an Art-Science-Technology section called LOEIL (Laboratoire Objet Espace Intelligence Langage – Laboratory Object Space Intelligence Language), directed by Louis Bec and Christian Soucaret, had just been inaugurated there. LŒIL pursued artistic and transdisciplinary research with a focus on digital technology, robotics, and electronics, at a time when nothing like it existed elsewhere in the landscape of French art schools. Within this structure, I set up a modest recording studio, one of the first in art schools, and I began teaching emerging sound technologies, such as multichannel spatialization, programming in Max MSP, and the implementation of new audio control interfaces (cameras for shape, motion, or color recognition; sensors with acquisition interfaces, etc.). At the same time, I guided students in reflecting on the use of these tools and how they could serve their artistic projects.

LOEIL also generated a large number of interdisciplinary projects involving strong collaboration between the different departments of the school, and contributions from numerous external experts. Thus, within the framework of these large-scale projects, students and teachers developed a taste for collaborative work and a curiosity about how disciplines other than their own approached the same issues. These trends remain strongly present at ESA–Aix even today, and have spread to include more traditional disciplines such as painting and sculpture. This multidisciplinary approach is also strongly supported by the school's theoretical teaching under the direction of Jean Cristofol, professor of philosophy and epistemology, with whom I have developed a close collaboration over the years. It is within this context of an artistic hub nourished by theory and science that my research activities subsequently developed.

As I took on more responsibility in my teaching role, I began inviting international digital artists, particularly those I had met during my time in the United States. Indeed, it was with GH Hovagimiyan that, in 1996, we set up a performance transmitted via audio and visual streaming, one of the first of its kind, between ESA – Aix and MIT in Boston(Port MIT). This performance required the installation of a dedicated dual line (which was considered broadband at the time). On another occasion, I invited Paul Dimarinis, a renowned figure in sound experimentation, to lead a workshop, shared with ENSA Villa Arson. He was the first artist to develop projects with synthesized voices and pitch tracking. The experience culminated in an exhibition of the students' work.

In the years that followed, I also established contacts with local institutions involved in sound and musical experimentation (GMEM, for example), with other art schools in France (ENSAN Villa Arson Nice), and abroad (SAIC School). (of the Arts Institute, Chicago). I established relationships with art and technology research groups: STEIM in Amsterdam, led by Michel Waisvisz, a pioneer in digital music interfaces (I/O), and the Computing Culture Research Group at MIT, led by Christopher Csíkszentmihályi.

Today, sound art is recognized as a distinct discipline—as evidenced by numerous books and exhibitions—and is taught in university departments and units. However, this is a recent phenomenon, and when I created the sound studio at ESA-Aix, the practice was little known, or at least poorly defined and often misunderstood.

As I developed a solid foundation in this emerging field of sound art, I began collaborating with my peers with the aim of expanding our knowledge and establishing our discipline within French art schools. The task proved complex and fraught with difficulties, as we were dealing with an evaluation system historically focused on visual, rather than temporal, works such as painting or sculpture. While other practices (such as installation or performance art) had already revealed their dichotomies with traditional exhibition formats, sound, in particular, always presents itself in essentially temporal forms, often disembodied from physical aesthetic objects. Therefore, I participated in the establishment and organization of a national association of sound teachers in art schools called BASSON. We met regularly between 1999 and 2003 to discuss the issues and perspectives related to our discipline. I also began working with Jérôme Joy, then a sound teacher at ENSAN-Villa Arson, with whom I shared the same research concerns, particularly regarding the artistic possibilities opened up by the new technologies of remote sound transmission. It was with Jérôme Joy that we later created the audio art research unit Locus Sonus.

While the research-creation approach is still relatively new in France, I have been actively involved in the evolution of this paradigm since the Ministry of Culture and Communication (MCC) launched the first calls for research projects from Schools of Art in the early 2000s. Indeed, after founding Locus Sonus with Jean-Paul Ponthot and Jérôme Joy, and obtaining research funding from the MCC, I was recruited to be part of the scientific council of the MCC's office for research and innovation from 2005 to 2008. In this role, I participated in the emerging debate surrounding the relationship between art and research, publishing Locus Sonus's position on this issue—a position that prioritizes practice over research, rather than making it the subject of research.

It is for this reason, and with the desire to develop a model that was not yet available in France, that I enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of the Arts London (UAL), where my research could be conducted through practice-based research, as defined by the university. In other words, research whose questions arise from practice and whose original results are presented in the form of a creation or artifact, explained and supplemented by the written thesis. This implied that the artistic project be central to my research, incorporated into my methodology, and presented as an integral part of my dissertation (RoadMusic).

I also contributed, albeit modestly, by proposing models and references, to the discussion initiated by Jean-Raymond Fanlo on creative research, which has now led to Aix-Marseille University (AMU) applying the specialization “Practice and Theory of Artistic and Literary Creation” to the Doctorate.