TD : A sound work by Max Neuhaus has been installed in the two staircases that link the ground level to the mezzanine. You naturally heard, and captured, this infrathin work during your investigations. And of course it'll continue to be projected into the space during your exhibition. It's very mineral, very geological – a work without beginning or end. Dial-O-Map 25°, on the other hand, will be "presented" over more than four months, which is a long time for an exhibition, but short by comparison to Neuhaus's work. You've had to fit into a dilated, but limited, time period in the construction of the project. How have you coped with this double temporal constraint – dilatation-concentration – in developing the auditory part of the project ?

PB : It can of course be seen like that. A sound work is governed both by its emission time and the spatial context in which it's produced – I don't know of any that flout this rule. Even a work that only suggests a sound in a relatively conceptual form must set up a spatio-temporal relationship with the listener.
Max Neuhaus's barely audible sound work has been in uninterrupted operation below the staircases that lead from the ground floor to the upper-level gallery since 1993. Like a white noise that lays out the whole spectrum of a sinusoidal frequency in a single breath, his setup gives us a real three-dimensional listening experience. The only audible frontiers result from the progressive fading of the signal density as you move away from the work. Neuhaus demonstrates that sounds can reveal the environment that contains them, and at the same time lead a perfectly autonomous life. The infinite duration of the work gives it the value of a promise.
With the acoustic and psychoacoustic rules that govern the construction of a sound setup, I'd say that in the first place, and before any question of time, it's distance that puts the viewer in contact with the work. And we might recall that it was Max Neuhaus who coined the expression "sound installation", back in the 1970s. For the entire duration of the exhibition, my setup, which is designed as a real resonator, will frequent the neighbourhood of Neuhaus's sound work. But this will no doubt be more than a simple cohabitation. His work will mark his domination of the void much more intensely than mine, given that it'll continue operating for a lot longer. It's there for good, let's say.
And then I was also telling you about the background. I think that in the construction of Dial-O-Map 25°, for a start the method's in place, and it takes in the whole building. I keep coming back to that; but what I've designed, above all, is a preliminary itinerary within which the degree of listening can very well go from an ephemeral grabbing of the listener's interest to a complete mobilisation of his attention for an indefinite period of time. After all, the sounds are scarcely more than an inexhaustible reserve of motifs, along with the environment that gives rise to them – a sequence of emergences. The temporal constraint that would normally dictate the expansions and compressions of the sound isn't what it seems, because in the end it's the listener who's the sole arbiter, and who traces out his path.
During my two years of investigations at capc, I had to hunt out the most minute acoustic secretions, and to understand their direction of propagation, their variations in length, so as to recycle them back into a listening experience. If you look at the work from the gallery, it takes the form of a 480 m² resonator that gives the auditory material emitted from the centre of the setup its full force. But seen from the floor, it's also a suspended belt on which the vibrations push back the surface, as if to keep the space behind it empty.

TD : Right. This resonator occupies the centre of the exhibition space, so that the visitors can't enter into the volume itself. They have to go up to the mezzanine if they want to see the work properly. It seems to me that you're deliberately playing on two elements, so as to make Dial-O-Map 25° immediately perceptible – the frustration of not being able to actually get into it, and the height needed to see the work from the gallery. Is that how it looks to you ?

PB : In order to understand what's immediately perceptible to the visitor, and what seems to be prohibited, the background has to be defined.
The possible links between the auditory and the visual parts of the work also have to be identified, and then the numerous troughs of the waves that allow the treatment process to be guessed at.
This project has as much to do with the infrastructure of the exhibition as with the role of the sounds and their evocative power. On the face of it, Dial-O-Map 25° is an enormous resonator that the visitor can't physically enter. A complex of basic geometrical surfaces makes up the visible part of the work. Conceived of as transfers on a plane, these surfaces have no real depth. They're all set at an angle of 25°, and assembled in symmetrical ridges according to acoustic constraints, using sophisticated construction techniques. This resonator is what produces the background effect. When planning it, I drew my inspiration from the acoustic screens that are installed beside airport runways to channel the noise made by the planes.
It's true that to begin with, the exhibition space seems entirely isolated. The acoustic screens impose a certain pathway on the visitor as soon as he enters the ground floor of the warehouse, and don't allow him to cross the floor. In this peripheral region, which is dark and without borders, the space spreads out in as complex a way as in Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves. The universe within this enclosure appears much larger from inside than from outside. Even though we perceive only a "rumble" of residual frequencies, and a glimmer round the side of the work, this is where everything gets done and undone; it's a movement that rushes in as much as it withdraws, in a subversive way. It's a situation that could be frustrating for the visitor, but this isn't the feeling I've tried to produce, in that the second phase of the route round the warehouse invites us to participate in a game of elevation and unveiling.
On the floor, Dial-O-Map 25° immediately reveals this contact zone, but only because it's tensed by the expectation of a future situation. The role of the work could've been to stop the listener in his tracks, so that he "had his back to the wall", but for the fact that he's given access to the unveiling level represented by the mezzanine, four metres up. Starting with this vaulted concourse that encircles the space, the perception of the setup really changes. It now offers a space of panoramic listening above the work. One looks out over an open space that produces an effect of solidifying sound. You can see it materialising at its source from six concave reflectors positioned thirteen metres farther on, under the arches. The space itself remains empty, like a "white room" in a laboratory under pressure from the light that streams down from the ceiling.
The duration of propagation of the sound plays a role of gradation between the listener in movement and the space itself. It's a powerful mechanism of localisation, because between the gallery and the reflectors that are putting out the sounds there's a distance "during which" all the standing waves and the harmonics intersect.
I've described this situation with a certain concern for detail, but there are still some weeks to go before the start of the exhibition, and nothing's been constructed yet. Everything's still in the digital models and my computer's spatialisation programs. And yet it's so disturbingly precise that, even before the structure's in place, we have difficulty imagining that the work will really sound all that different.
It'll certainly be architecture for the ear, as Iannis Xenakis said about his Philips Pavilion – listening in the void, where silence is the guarantor of all the traces disseminated along the way. And of course it's to silence that I give the most important structural role. It condenses the construction markers, but it also extends outwards the indications and impressions that the listener has of the waves he perceives, and those he thinks he perceives.

TD : If you consign sound to silence, you also consign it to the architecture that's going to give it another identity, another range, during its projection by reverberation and diffraction. Here, in a way, you're coming full circle: the sound emerges from the source (this is the work of recording sounds and vibrations that you've been doing for two years), and returns at the end to find its density, its definitive brilliance.

PB : I have to admit, I don't feel I'm really capable of bringing a sound work to an end. I think you can see this in other projects such as the LECSonic, which for the last few years has taken the form of a research laboratory, or again most of the pieces that function in "loop" or "series" mode. And there again, even if silence presents irreversible, finite forms, its complex interruptions quickly rule out any possibility of a clear answer. In this kind of context, it often helps me in localising the variations and putting together the different stages of an overall plan.
So it could be said that with this work, silence is always present somewhere – present and without real duration; the kind of unstable void you get in most large spaces. It could also be said that during certain periods the site's totally plunged into a compact, bottomless abyss; which is the grandiose side of what this cathedral-like architecture would no doubt produce, in the first place, if we could imagine it for an instant in absolute soundlessness. Still, everything points to the conclusion that our explanation's not yet precise enough to justify the place of Dial-O-Map 25° in this situation.
The central object of my phonographic activity is generally an act of capture. But although it's often drawn towards the void, and arid sound environments, one of the elementary principles is always that of assimilating what's perceived to what was designed. This silence, if it really is one, should normally start with a split in the event continuum. But that's not what's happening here. I've had occasion to record alone in capc, with no other human being around. Using a parabolic microphone that I placed in the centre of the building (at the precise spot that the reflectors will occupy during the installation), seeking out the phenomenon of openness that the silence should've produced if it had really been present, I could normally have captured it, if only for a short period. But in the recordings, you can clearly make out the structure of the warehouse, like a huge resonator, sensitive to the slightest sounds from outside. At first it seemed to have the consistency of a perfectly anechoic silence, but in the end that was just a delay-effect in the wave path. What happened was that the waves were ineluctably filled up by a movement of absorption, as if an ever-present guiding thread had marked out a passage that was in no way separated from its surroundings.