MARGUERITE HUMEAU

'ACT I / The epic quest - Documents' is the first chapter of 'Proposal for resuscitating prehistoric creatures'. The heroine's odyssey is told through a collection of real and fictitious documents: letters, emails, found images, scans, interviews. This documents have all been gathered and published in a book designed by Ghazaal Vojdani. This book is now part of the MoMA permanent collection. 'Proposal for resuscitating prehistoric creatures' is an opera which sets up the rebirth of cloned creatures, their wandering and their sound epic. They are seeking to evolve in our contemporary era. The designer, who became the heroine of a quasi-mystic epic journey, aims at resuscitating the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tract. This is problematic from the scientific point of view: since the vocal tract is made of soft tissue, it does not fossilise. The only things that have been preserved through time are the surrounding bones. The inner parts have to be redesigned. For more than a year Marguerite Humeau has been discussing with palaeontologists, zoologists, veterinarians, engineers, explorers, surgeons, ear and throat specialists, and radiologists. Humeau had to overcome the difficulty of telling history, and prehistory; and also to create a work from...

The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures on Soundcloud (Live Recording in the Politique Fiction exhibition): https://soundcloud.com/tar-magazine/the-opera-by-marguerite-humeau 'ACT III / The Opera: Installation & Performance' is the third chapter of 'Proposal for resuscitating prehistoric creatures'. The opera is performed by three creatures vocal tracts and their synthetic vibrating vocal cords: a Mammoth Imperator, an Entelodont aka "Terminator Pig" and an Ambulocetus aka "Walking Whale". The opera was especially commissioned by curator Alexandra Midal and first performed during the Politique Fiction exhibition in Saint-Etienne (May 2012 – January 2013). 'Proposal for resuscitating prehistoric creatures' is an opera which sets up the rebirth of cloned creatures, their wandering and their sound epic. They are seeking to evolve in our contemporary era. The designer, who became the heroine of a quasi-mystic epic journey, aims at resuscitating the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tract. This is problematic from the scientific point of view: since the vocal tract is made of soft tissue, it does not fossilise. The only things that have been preserved through time are the surrounding bones. The inner parts have to be redesigned. For more than a year Marguerite Humeau has been discussing with palaeontologists, zoologists, veterinarians, engineers, explorers, surgeons...

Remix and Battle with Mitchel van Dinther

Yesterday, I saw: an active volcano, half-dozen of UFOs invading the sky, a black hole improvising itself as a sunglass, some dude saying he had been a monkey in a previous life, whilst Katrina was trying to suck the world into her void. I could feel the ground starting to move, slightly, and my feet being aspired, but I said to the lady: come another time. [ ... ] We have killed the modern utopia of a world without any sense of the absolute, the invisible, or of eternity. We need to invent new approaches to the spiritual. The essay investigates the multiple Commandments of the post-modern sublimed space. It aims at understanding the spatial mechanisms of the sacred. We will try to imagine what the spaces of tomorrow will look like, in relation with the new experiences of the sublime. In the new technological context of a synthetic world, science and spirituality will finally be reunited. For example, the exciting possibilities of nature as well as the possibility to change it and invent its new forms could open new paths. Artificiality is dead, now it is drowned into the real to create simulated worlds. The essay takes cues in...