Bertrand Lamarche - Looping

LOOPING, 2011
Live video installation, turntable, record, camera, fluorescent tube, table, speakers, amplifier, vocoder, microphone
Ed. 2 + 1 AP
Collection FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris

Bertrand Lamarche, Looping, 2011, view of the exhibition
Bertrand Lamarche, Looping, 2011. View of the exhibition " Paint it Black" at Le Plateau, FRAC Ile de France, 2013
©Martin Argyroglo

"To sing, to rotate, to swing, to shrink. 

looping is a part of a serie of speculative architectural investigations around the project of a njght club The Funnel, housed in a railway rotunda, which becomes a site of possible transformation and duplication. The Funnel is also one of the elements of a mock-up that is developed and reinterpreted as a fictional space. It depicts a part of a city in eastern France Nancy, a landscape marked by railway infrastructure and urban housing, described by architectural historians as a « manifestation of the repressed ». 

Looping could be considered as the modelling of the night club atmosphere and temporality. This machine/projection performs a kind of ecstatic trance or hypnotic exaltation. However,the device does not refer to anything other than its own presence. The space is first and foremost that of the machine’autonomy and of its perpetual machinery made visible. Spinning on a turntable, is a 33rpm record with a single closed groove producing the continuous sound of a loop recorded with my voice. A vocoder connected to a microphone placed in front of the speaker exacts random distortions on the original loop. 

The voice is transformed in an attempt to sound like a « Mini mouse soprano », a term used to describe Kate Bush’s voice in John Mendelssohn’s Waiting for kate Bush. The repetition and slight contortions of the sound echo the distortions experienced when repeatedly listening to that same song, evoking the idea of hallucination. The simultaneous video projection supports this impression. A camera films a cardboard cylinder covered in mirror paper that rotates eccentrically on the disc. A cone of light cuts through the mist of a smoke machine, between the projector and the screen. The light oscillates to both sides of the space, in sync with the turntable, the sound and the image. On the screen, the reflected camera’s eye dilates and retracts. It evokes a passage or a moving hole and seems to indicate the entrance to the night club." 

Bertrand Lamarche

Bertrand Lamarche, Looping, 2011
Exhibition view at Le Plateau, FRAC Ile de France, 2013 © Martin Argyroglo

Bertrand Lamarche, Looping, 2011. Exhibition view at Le Plateau, FRAC Ile-de-France, 2013 © Martin Argyroglo


Bertrand Lamarche, Looping, 2011. Exhibition view at Le Plateau, FRAC Ile-de-France, 2013
© Martin Argyroglo


Bertrand Lamarche, Looping, 2011. Exhibition view at Le Plateau, FRAC Ile-de-France, 2013 © Martin Argyroglo