Clinamen — Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Equal parts artist, musician, and composer, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot mixes various media to explore the boundary between art and the everyday. Starting with a wide variety of situations, he develops systems that extend the notion of a musical score by transforming repurposed objects into sophisticated instruments that generate spontaneous, live sounds without human intervention. These unorthodox sonic configurations are realized in environments responding to the architecture and contextual framework of an installation space, creating a bespoke and “alive” listening experience that reveals the process that generates the music to the visitor’s eyes and ears alike.

The celebrated artist comes to the Armory to mount the largest iteration to date of his ongoing aquatic and musical installation. Within the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, this immersive installation features a series of circular basins filled with water in which ordinary ceramic bowls, selected for their timbre and drift, float and gently collide to produce melodious chiming sounds as a light current pushes them along. The title refers to the random motion of atoms, a concept that resonates with the work’s inevitably changing and unpredictable nature. Each moment in the installation’s life is unique, offering a sensory and temporal experience that is constantly renewing itself and in which each spectator is invited to listen, contemplate, and explore their relationship to time and sound as an individual and a collective experience.