Encore

Interactive sound installation, 2005
Samuel Bianchini

Engineering: Jean-Baptiste Droulers

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Encore, Samuel Bianchini, 2005
Training Center, solo exhibition, La Villa Formose, Galerie de l’École supérieure des arts et de la communication de Pau, France, from May, 2005.
Photograph: © Samuel Bianchini - ADAGP

Encore is an interactive sound installation presented in an exhibition space. Like an ‘absence sensor’, the apparatus produces a sound–the cheering of supporters, to be exact–when the last person exits the room and leaves behind him an empty space devoid of all human presence.
Although it can be considered as an autonomous work, Encore was in fact primarily conceived to be presented alongside other interactive visual installations by the same artist, such as, for example, Training Center, Keep your guard up, what's more with many or pOlymic games. All of these put in play a sporting event or a performance, and all of them, whether they originate in the world of sports or of the stage, invite the spectator onto the field of ‘performance’.
Invisible but audible, Encore surprises the spectator as he’s leaving. With his back to the work he’s just manipulated, the cheers calling him back throws him into a slight confusion and prompts him to turn back and look again at what he has just been manipulating. Why these cheers? Where do they come from? Who are they for? For him? For the protagonists in the image? The uncertainty lingers. The staging of the spectator is ‘double’, and can as such be understood both in the passive and active voices.