Degree Zero of Sound and Image : Creation before the ActSecond meeting of the International Research Project

19 et 20 juin 2014
Galerie Colbert
Salles Walter Benjamin et Nicolas Fabri-de-Pereisc
entrée libre

Accès

6 rue des Petits-Champs ou 2, rue Vivienne
75002 Paris

During this second meeting of DEGREE ZERO we intend to move from 'nothingness' and 'degree zero' to notions of improvisation. According to the principles of historical anthropology, society and culture are better understood by a transversal approach than by reference to quantity. It is a help to cross boundaries. This suggests that the characteristics of presence-absence, improvisation-repetition and rhythm (viz. the movement or immobility of the body, the proclamation of a text by heart, the series of images, the cadences in music or the gestures in theater and ritual) might be analyzed in two different ways. First, by an emphasis on the collective rhythms that exert pressure on artistic expression (cf. Bourdieu, ‘l’éthique de la conformité’; Mauss, ‘Etude sommaire de la représentation du temps’); second, by attention to the many rhythms in nature (seasons, day and night, the tides) and in the body (heart-beat, breathing, footsteps, voice, memory and decay). What is the impact of rhythm on institutionalized cultural artifacts? How can we define the threshold between nothingness, stillness or void and the first dawning of "something", the liminal picked up in a trembling line, in a first thought or a new stage of being present?