
British biologists Jean and Peter Madawar once epitomized a virus as “a piece of bad news wrapped in protein”. Seizing this bad news, Antoine Bertin is letting us hear Corona virus differently ”Once decoded, the genome of Covid 19 is a sequence of A, C, G and U repeated 30,000 times, it’s a short text compared to 3 billion DNA of the human genome” specifies the French artist. Using a sonification process, Antoine Bertin assigns a note to each letter to compose a melody whose tempo is given by the acceleration of the spread of the virus and its future decrescendo if the confinement is respected. He thus gives us the opportunity to listen to the invisible storm that has cloistered us behind our windows for 3 weeks. This comes as a strangely premonitory observation of nature’s movements in confinement for Antoine Bertin, as his next installation is a human burrow dug in the forest of Kielder (in the north of England), initially planned for this coming May. Human Burrow is an underground listening station where the visitor will be invited to descend to curl up against cork walls that resonate the tiny movements of the forest: vibrations produced by animals, signals from plants, movements of the underground … This sound library, set to be buried for 10 years on the hillside, will offer the immersive experience of a world where hearing takes precedence over sight, and where the concepts of space, time and listening are redefined. Lire la suite…