Soundmindscapes 2008 project with scientist JJ.Aucouturier www.soundmindscapes.info
	"Summary" We humans are visual creatures. Everyday, we look at each other’s faces and bodies; we watch movies and advertisements; we appreciate the vision of a park or regret the dull visual environment of the commuter train. We all know that there is a difference between what the world is, and what we see of the world: we choose to look certain things and to ignore some others. Artists from many domains are experts at seeing things with their subjectivity: the difference between a photograph of a landscape and the painting of the same landscape shows the artistic sensitivity of one individual, his/her mindscape. We often forget that the same goes for sounds. Close your eyes. The sounds you hear reveal a lot about your environment, like a landscape of sounds. Often, you will hear sounds from things that you cannot see, for instance, two people talking in the next room. Often, you will notice sounds that you didn’t think were there, for instance, the buzz of the air conditioner which you normally ignore. From the sounds of a room, we decide whether it is calm or busy, agreeable or stressful. Some sounds remind us of the past, like the taste of Proust’s Madeleine. I remember the sound of the rusted gate at the train crossing near my family house, twenty years ago. What about you? A machine, such as a computer, cannot ignore sounds. Contrary to us, it records and attends to everything, interesting or not, beautiful or not. A sound recording is like a photograph; our sound perception is rather like a painting. We are all sound artists. Our soundscapes reveal our mindscapes. The exhibition and its associated workshop explore the evocative power of sounds. How the sounds of our environments, past or present, link to our inner mindscapes? By which artistic process do we choose which sound to ignore, which to remember, which to love or hate? What is the different between a hearing human and a hearing machine? We hear from our environment, but what does our environment hear from us? What if everyday objects could hear, what would they hear, what would they like, what would they remember?