Artist's statement

Gaël Tissot creates sound installations that combine music and poetic texts. In the line of digital arts, he diverts technologies and computer tools insofar as they allow us to imagine new listening situations: geolocalized sound works, participatory works, spatialized sound, among others. Each project tries to humanize the technologies that regulate our lives by diverting them to develop our sensibilities about poetry, freedom and sharing.

Through electroacoustic music and narrative poetic writing, his works explore themes such as solitude in a hyper-connected world, the feeling of strangeness in our societies, walking and wandering. Through the sensoriality of listening, they seek to re-enchant the world, to present a known reality in a new and surprising, sometimes almost magical, light.

From this practice emerges a playful conception, in the noblest sense of the term, of the work of art: to play with the expectations/surprises of the listener, to play an instrument, to play with conventions. Playfulness and seriousness, lightness and gravity; so many antinomies that invite everyone to discover themselves from a different angle, to explore previously unknown areas within themselves.

This method also guides Gaël Tissot’s experiments with live performances (poetic performance, live radio play, dance, etc.) alone or in collaboration with such artists as Neige Salinas, Elodie Loustau or Thérésa Berger.

Biography

Following his training as a musician (which earned him a piano prize in François-Michel Rignol’s class), Gaël Tissot's career was deeply marked by computer programming and poetic writing. Their discovery led him to the Conservatoire de Toulouse where he won a prize for electroacoustic music in the class of Bertrand Dubedout, the Conservatoire de Lyon, the University of California, Berkeley, and finally the writing of a PhD thesis on the electroacoustic music of François Bayle.

Gaël Tissot creates sound installations that combine music and poetic texts. In the line of digital arts, he diverts technologies and computer tools insofar as they allow us to imagine new listening situations: geolocalized sound works, participatory works, spatialized sound, among others. If the word "trobador" is taken as its French counterpart "trouveur" (finder), then he would undoubtedly be thought of as a contemporary troubadour sitting behind his computer keyboard, listening to the sounds of the world around him.

Gaël Tissot has participated in residencies in places dedicated to digital arts (Château Ephémère, Université de Grenoble, Le Bel Ordinaire...) as well as in various festivals in France and abroad (Athens Digital Arts Festival, Safra'numériques, Recto-VRso-Laval Virtual, La science de l'art, Piksel-Bergen (Norway), Manifeste-IRCAM...). His works have also won several awards (International Prize 2018 of the Destellos Foundation, Second Prize of the Mauricio Kagel International Competition...).