Event
MEET at the Biennale d’Architettura with Oxyville, the sound utopia of Jean-Michel Jarre
At the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, entitled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective and curated by Carlo Ratti, an unprecedented gateway between art, technology and sensory perception opens: Oxyville, the immersive sound installation signed by Jean-Michel Jarre and Antoin Picon, with the artistic coordination of MEET Digital Culture Center and its founder Maria Grazia Mattei.
It was in MEET that Jarre identified an ideal interlocutor, a creative ally capable of catalyzing his vision into new and radical forms. The meeting with Maria Grazia Mattei generated fertile ground for experimenting with a language that transcends the territory experienced so far.
The artwork: Oxyville
Oxyville was created as a conceptual and sensory expansion of the Oxymore album, and is presented as a three-dimensional sound experience in which the audience is invited to close their eyes and “listen to the architecture.” A ten-minute acoustic journey per session through oscillating soundscapes.
For Oxyville that acoustics is no longer a secondary aspect of the architectural experience, but a primary, foundational material that can shape inner and collective space. At the end of the journey, each participant will be able to leave a comment, an idea, a verbal image of the city they “saw” with their hearing.
A collective and generative process, where natural intelligence intertwines with artificial intelligence, in the sign of co-creation. The project will have a finissage at MEET, in Milan, in November, ideally taking the dialogue between Jarre and Mattei back to where it began: to a space where digital becomes culture.
A process of co-creation
Oxyville is a laboratory of visions, a perceptual experiment that questions the centrality of the gaze in the construction of space, recovering the legacy of futurists such as Luigi Russolo and pioneers of concrete music such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. A gesture that renews the very idea of design, extending it beyond visible matter to vibrate in the dimension of the invisible.
In the time of an architecture that questions multiple intelligences, natural, artificial and collective, Oxyville stands out as a radical and collective experience, capable of redefining the way we inhabit sound and, perhaps, the way we imagine the city to come.
19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective
Corderie dell’Arsenale, Venice
May 10-November 23
Featured image courtesy of Francesco Prandoni
