About

Yann Leguay

Brussels sound artist Yann Leguay, defined as a "media saboteur" by Consumer Waste, seeks to bend sound materiality using basic means, in the form of objects and videos or during installations and performances. His blatant disregard for accepted standards of audio behaviour appropriates unusual machines for playing audio media: the use of an angle grinder to perform live microphone destruction, the use of open hard disks as turntables... His activity is just as deviant, whether it is working on a silkscreened disc, a 7-inch 45 rpm without a centre circle or a disc composed of vinyl recordings scraped with a scalpel. His "Phonotopy" offers a conceptual approach to recording media. Yann Leguay is also the curator of the DRIFT series on the Artkillart label. He is also involved in many collective projects such as radio research.

Medias

Volta

The past few years, Yann Leguay’s works focused on various media and interfaces using mechanical sound as a musical instrument. As technology evolves, mechanics are disappearing and replaced by miniaturized electronic components and electric charges. The project Volta addresses this change and explores the potential of the electricity itself, as a source. Using the technique of a plasma speaker, the installation consists of a pure electrical arc producing the sound on its own. A sound file is sent into the high voltage and a voice emerges from the arc. The text comes from a radio residency done with the ∏-node collective; the words are the translation of the noise of the internet network processed with a speech-to-text software then read by Jean-François Blanquet. The result becomes an oracle roaming between present and future, between identification and materiality.