Bio
I’m Julien Bayle.
I’m a french minimalist digital artist working at the interface of sounds & visuals & data.
My work explores the relationship between data & art through music pieces, live performances & A/V installations. If my technology under the hood is often described as “complex and intriguing”, this is the result of a long process in which each step became a refinement in which the superfluous is each time removed.
I’m the founder of the minimalist & idm label named bitsquare.
CV/book available in french and english.
Blog available here
Interviews here
You can subscribe to my newsletter here.
Artistic & Research Statements
As a sound designer & composer, I’m working on very long & evolving soundscapes in which smooth & low frequencies filtered textures can cross sparkly & bright bursts of noise very rich in harmonics. I like to work with very long sequences produced by algorithms. Algorithms are one of the most important piece in my work especially because they are designed for running under multiple constraints that give me a way to control the sounds & sequences produced. I like to include external data sources, often in real time, or randomizing processes more or less control by myself.
If each part contains its own nature, the global pieces can be felt like coherent journeys.
As a live performer, I often design specific sets for each places that makes me playing almost each time a new live performance. I try to involve the audience by progressively making my ambient soundscapes or my complex 5/4 or ternary rhythmic structures entering deeper in the mind. Each progression contains almost each time parts without tempo, more based on the places of each sound in a time interval, playing with the relative place of each parts both in the time & in the tune, trying to raise disorientation feelings near from concrete & electro-acoustic music fields.
As an A/V installations designer, I work with huge sets of data, from locally available ones to real-time pumped from the Internet. Each data source is filtered, refine & finally used to produced sounds & visuals focused pieces. Each work is unique and each piece is adapted to the place that hosts it. I contribute to several pieces visible a bit everywhere in the world, I participate to many show-specific software designs, even if I’m now focusing on my own art.
As a technology teacher, I share my experiences and approaches with students on site, or remotely through the Internet. I help them technically but with their own understanding of what they want to artistically express. This latter thing is the most interesting, according to them, because I’m their interface between their own future art & the technology available to express it. I’m very involved in Max6 framework design, but I’m reading C/C++, Java, JavaScript & more languages which makes me able to work with a lot people with very different background. I write books in which I try to push my own approaches about the use of technology in art.
Technology teaching & Lectures
Because technology is a proper part of my work, I’m involved and concerned by teaching and transmitting knowledge & experiences. My students are currently only private ones. I’m working with them onsite or online remotely. As they say, they are “looking for understanding my different approaches of technical problems [they] can find on their way during an artistic research or a pure operational problem”. I’m providing both academic-like courses & artistic project oriented ones. I’ll be involved deeper as soon as possible with art & design schools.
I wrote some books and especially this one about Arduino.
I’m giving lectures both about my art, describing my different path from the inspirating idea to the piece & about technology, speaking about the state of the art of sound design frameworks & visuals. Being interested by the interaction between both sound & visual matter, I’m also providing help in User Interaction Design fields. Then, I’m teaching Ableton Live & Max for Live a lot too, as an ableton certified trainer. I recorded a huge 7 hours course about Ableton Live 9 et PUSH.