Melancholy Of The Chernobyl Frogs is an interpretation of Peter Cusack's original field recording "Chernobyl Frogs". By adopting acoustic biomimetic, algorithmically controlled compositional techniques, the piece is created as a twisted doppelgänger of the original recording. Aural simulacra of the order of maleficence are a bad representations of an original; Something like sonic caricatures that by putting on a mask, underline and surface narratives that otherwise would remain hidden behind the certainty of reality. Thanks goes to Peter Cusack for allowing his piece to be used as a model for this experiment. The piece is one of the eight parts of a larger body of work called "Natural Perversion" and has been featured as a site specific installation at the Tower of the Winds (Athens Historical Centre) as part of Athens Digital Art Festival 2021.

Melancholy of the Chernobyl Frogs

One of humankind’s notable achievements is supposed to have been the founding of the United Nations and the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It consists of 1360 words. Observing the world around me, these words feel empty. Almost everywhere I look, I see gender discrimination, sexual repression, homophobia, racism and enforced displacement. If there are truths within the text, it feels, they got lost somewhere within the noise. 1360 words is a performative cynical recounting of these words; an indirect political statement reaching out to enhance individual and collective awareness of the distance we still need to cover, so that the words will reclaim their ‘signified’ aspect and emerge through the noise as meaningful materialised realities.

Conception & Composition: Luc Messinezis.
Performance: Lina Exarhou.

1360 Words

A reality is as real as it is perceived.

Military rhythms performed by students as they march through the streets of Athens, not because they choose to, but because - just like little soldiers - are told to. An act and a tradition set to celebrate the "independence" of a modern state.

The students obey, they perform well, turn the military sounds into a game and sound itself travels though air, alleys and broken speakers, transforming itself into a symphony of contradictions; conceptually harmonious with the contradictions of a contemporary society.

March in March

"Last May an Orca was found to be swimming upstream the Seine. An effort to redirect the mammal back to the sea by using sound recordings failed as the animal seemed to be gravely ill and disoriented. Bioacoustics experts mentioned that the sounds the animal was producing were most likely distress calls. A decision to euthanise the whale was taken, yet soon enough, the mammal was found dead.

"“Upstream (the Seine)” utilises the recordings of the Orcinus Orca species in their natural habitat in the Antarctic provided by Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in 2022. The piece is an effort to auralise the fact that more and more species demonstrate strange behaviours that are deviating from the norm. 

"By using strictly the concrete recordings of the Orcas as source material and through the language of electroacoustic music and sound transformation techniques, the artist re-imagines the journey of the whale from the Antarctic to the Seine; from the natural to the unnatural, from health to illness as being driven by an inexplicable, almost mystifying force ultimately leading it to its demise. Through this paradigm the artist attempts to underline the alarming increasing frequency of the occurrence of such phenomena."

Part of the Polar Sounds project, a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research

Upstream (the Seine)

Another excerpt from the Eavesdropping series; eavesdropping at a neighbourhood of Athens at 2:30 in the morning.

The Mediterranean in economical crisis.

Eavesdropping; Crisis - Part 3

Stereo adaptation of the Sound Art installation "Wunderkammer: The sound cabinet of curiosities" which was presented at IMT Gallery, London in November 2008 as part of the exhibition "Audio Forensics".

The sound cabinet of curiosities was composed using the "Choroechoic" Compositional strategy which treats sound objects as tangible ones and is based on the concept of reduced listening and the acousmatic experience. 

Sound Cabinet of Curiosities

"I saw" is Luc Messinezis's contribution to the group sound art project "Sonic Exquisite Corpse" which was presented at Soundfjord Gallery, London and curated by Helen Frosi.

The piece - following the curator's instructions - responded to another artist's work using as sole inspiration the artist's interpretation of the theme "Sight". The Sonic Exquisite Corpse project thus creates a chain of interconnected artworks in the same manner surrealist artists used to practice.

"I Saw" explores sonically sight and the transition between dark, blur and unsure towards light and clarity.

I Saw

Audio scaled down example in octet format for SIM_phony #1.

SIM_phony Octet

Stereo adaptation of the multi-channel interactive sound installation 'God is Sitting in a Room' Presented at 'Diko mou' group digital arts exhibition in Athens in 2016.

God is Sitting in a Room

"Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion” - A. Camus.

‘Sisyphus in bits’ is an innovative way for spontaneous storytelling,  highlighting at the same time how modern media influences the way art is being created or perceived. A text to speech algorithm is applied upon the artist’s Facebook wall. Using a variety of different voice bots and with small scale appropriate sonic  interventions, editing and acoustic simulation of various audio elements, an original narration unfolds with interesting peculiarities:

Replacing actors and narrators with bots is a consequence of the digital era and symbolizes the upcoming, more and more evident inability of perception to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. Sisyphus in Bits reflects on Baudrillard’s orders of the sign; the sacramental, the order of maleficence, of sorcery and that of pure simulacra.

The artwork draws from Camus's philosophical Idea the Absurd. 'Sisyphus in Bits' attempts to highlight behavioral self defining as an inevitable act of freedom, which in its own turn results in unpredictability.

Sisyphus In Bits

This is about Aural Simulacra of the sacramental order. The order of the heard to which audio reflections of a profound acoustic reality belong. Field recordings seem to be of the sacramental order. Yet two questions arise. How the medium of production and of reproduction affects the orders of the heard? How true is it that the medium IS the message?

New Gods / Old Gods is a sound sculpture produced as the outcome of the research on these questions. The acoustic reality of the shipyards located at the outskirts of Piraeus was captured in parallel by two different means; a digital recorder and a vintage reel-to-reel tape recorder. The audience are invited to hearken to those parallel recordings that have been arranged as a soundscape composition, but diffused each from one channel of the stereophonic spectrum. The sculpture is a commentary on the value and importance of the old and its relationship to the notion of the new. A battle of the media trying to tell the same story. The parallelisms are for the audience to make up, by the feelings this audiovisual appreciation evokes.

New Gods / Old Gods was on display during the OANNES open studio weekend the 4th and 5th of May 2019.

The Sacramental Order: New Gods / Old Gods

Sonic Rhyme is the materialized outcome of an experimental effort by sound artists La Cosa Preziosa and Luc Messinezis trying to explore the narrative potential of concrete sound.
Each piece reflects on an initial thematic and is then composed by the counter-response of one artist to the response the other has provided without any use of additional stimuli or arrangement.
As a result a dialogue of sonic rhymes is taking form and the artists explore absolute concepts through a prism of their own perception and existence.
This is the first installment of the series and is titled: The unsheathing from the animal

Sonic Rhyme - Unsheathing from the Animal

In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesised relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The valley is the point at which one feels eeriness and awkwardness when coming face to face with a being of extreme human resemblance, which is not human.
Sound artist Luc Messinezis using sound generating algorithms invokes aural simulacra of the order of sorcery and sculptor Yiannis Brouzos calls upon metal simulacra of the order of maleficence.

Together in their work, Flowers from the Uncanny Valley they bring the valley into the realm of the real. They create a physical metaphor of a place where the fake and the real can no longer be distinguished. Within the valley, roles reverse and the wonderer enters the chilling dream of the precession of the simulacra.

Metal sculptural flowers, through a sonic process conjure an artificial habitat without original, empowering the visitors to walk through an environment where the artificial is the real and the real emerges as the uncanny.

Flowers from the Uncanny Valley

A journey through hyperreality in four movements:

I. 48K Dreams
II. Dissimulating there is nothing
III. Reaching for the cloud
IV. Death & Resurrection (in advance)

Paraphrasing J. Baudrullard’s “Precession of the simulacra”, Luc Messinezis created a Musique concrète piece which explores what would be considered the aural equivalent of that phenomenon. In the realm of appearances, simulacra are things that have no relationship to anything real, yet they have become a reality of their own. The artist attempts to lead the audience on a sonic journey through time and space associated with media archeology; from the appearance of the first home computers until today’s standard technological tools such as smartphones and their recognisable concrete audible reality, which through the last few decades has been preceding ours.

“Procession of the Simulacra. A journey through hyperreality in four movements”, was officially selected for presentation as part of Ars Electronica 2020 Sound Campus programme. The work was accessible from the 9th until the 13th of September 2020 via the social and public virtual environment for sound art exhibition and concerts, Metaverse.

Procession Of The Simulacra.

A short excerpt of a longer work part of the "Melanchoholic" series. Base material is concrete recordings of a toy record player. Phase technique has been used for this experiment.

Phase Flower

Amplified silence revealing tension at 4 o'clock in a winter's morning at a neighbourhood of Athens.
This is part of a research project which explores tension and a series called "Eavesdropping"
The male voice is repeating the phrase "I want my mother" in Greek and in-between of this mantra the phrases "Go away" and "You whore" are audible. 

Eavesdropping; Crisis - Part 1

Statement:

"All my life I move in space with my will for a guide. Space does not define me. It is I that Exist and create it..
Time on the other hand looks rigid, straight, strict and vindictive. I befriend it and it bends. It shatters into pieces and reveals its insides, its true nature; the one that it is ashamed to let become perceived.
Now Space, Time and Self walk together like in that old photograph I saw in my grandmother's house, depicting three sisters walking down the street dressed alike, holding each other's arm under the shadow of a Father, a God to walk with them; their leader, ruler and servant."

Destination: Journey [Excerpt]

Luc Messinezis is an artist and researcher working across sound, installation and performance. His practice oscillates between aural awareness, philosophy and the humanities. Coming from a scientific background, he changed direction toward creative practices and now holds an MA in sound arts awarded by the University of the Arts London and a PhD for his research on Aural Simulacra at the Ionian University. Luc reads the act of listening as an extrovert gesture of expression and tends to ‘mediumizing’ the audience by placing them at the epicenter of the work. He has presented a multitude of artworks across the globe with notable activities including among others his presentations at Ars Electronica 2020 (AT), minus20degree Festival 2020 (AT), Primarolia Festival 2019 (GR), ADAF 2015/2021 (GR) and Ethnographic Terminalia 2011 (CA). He was a resident at AIR – Niederosterreich (AT) in 2010 and he was nominated for the ScreenGrab7 2015 Media Award (AU) for his work ‘The Modern book of Cynics’. As a researcher Luc has presented his work in many international conferences, and has authored several publications. Finally, he is affiliated with the Ionian University’s Department of Audio and Visual Arts and he is an active member of the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Association and the Hellenic Society for Acoustic Ecology.

Luc Messinezis

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