percussion, processing and video

Integral/parent work: Lifetime

Pierre Jodlowski’s multimedia triptych Lifetime (premiered in 2005) examines our relationships with time, money, and our individual and collective identities in a modern capitalist society. The concept of “lifetime value”, writes the composer, “designates, not without a certain cynicism, the calculable economic value of an individual’s lifespan. In a world more and more structured by financial gain, man becomes a kind of merchandise trapped in the implacable spiral of profit. Faced with such a process, many artists today are taking a look at the world, and trying to steer it in another direction.”

Time and Money is the first part of the triptych. Jodlowski writes, “A percussionist is surrounded by images and sounds, a quilt of gestures, energies, and references. Originally, it served to question our society, our relationships with others, time, and money… [It is] one way among others to proclaim our revolt against the absurdity of an economic and social system that is adrift; a revolt that is transposed and channelled here, becoming the piece’s underlying framework.”

“The visual component of the work,” he goes on to say, “was made in collaboration with Vincent Meyer, an artist specialising in computer-generated imagery. “In short sequences conceived as interludes, computer-generated images set off a process where objects are dematerialised and come to mirror or anticipate the musical and visual discourse. The virtual object, having become a sort of disembodied icon, creates a distance from the present reality and reveals the non-temporality of the time/money problem. Images rotate, time-measuring objects dance, and numbers scroll by at high speed, accompanying musical gestures in a metaphor of our drifting condition.”

A Deruchie [ii-07]