Loris Gréaud is a cross-disciplinary artist whose fields of interest and activity range from architecture to quantum mechanics, from experimental film to electronic music (he has founded both a movie studio and a record label). His work, is oriented toward ideas and processes rather than finished forms, frequently involving collaborations with scientists or experts in various disciplines. Gréaud was born in 1979 in Eaubonne, France, and currently lives and works in Paris. He has been featured in numerous exhibitions in Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, Berlin, Milan, Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. In 2004, with architects Marc Dolger and Damien Ziakovic, he created DGZ Research, a multidisciplinary production studio to support his various projects. Gréaud was awarded the Ricard Prize in 2005.

Loris Gréaud and Anti-Pop Consortium in Avatar Studios (New York) recording and filming The Snorks: a concert for creatures. Photo by Christian Patterson. Courtesy of Gréaudstudio.

His long-term project and film, The Snorks: A Concert for Creatures, is the conception of an urban legend and a hallucinatory epic inspired by the discovery of a mysterious land, the world of the abyss.
The Snorks has been thought of as a spatiotemporal capsule in which the possibility of “alien communication” is constantly hatched and replayed. This concept is driven by the abstract hip-hop of iconic group, Anti-Pop Consortium; the extreme explorations of the Antares deep-sea station; research by MIT Sea Grant College and the experimental pyrotechnics of group F. For almost 36 months, the Snorks phenomenon has travelled all over the world, from Abu Dhabi to Paris via Los Angeles, Boston, New York and even Hawaii. It has been through the air, across the ocean and underwater, and in its wake it has brought on board a plethora of experts, authors, artists and other collaborators who are all endeavoring to meet the project’s demands and obsessions.

Loris Gréaud and David Lynch in Hollywood on the filming of The Snorks: a concert for creatures. Photo: Clément Ottenwaelter. Courtesy of Gréaudstudio.

Today the depths of the deep sea remain a foreign space, in which recent discoveries literally call mankind’s acquired knowledge into question. Deep-sea creatures appear to behave peculiarly, adopting mystifying ways of life. The latest scientific observations have brought to light an astounding communication system: bioluminescence. Phytoplankton and other creatures use bioluminescence for various reasons, producing gigantic “clouds of light” that are visible from outer space. Moreover, scientists claim that bioluminescence is the most widespread form of communication on earth.
Utopia develops within the real, and the illusion of “intraterrestrial” communication materializes as a concert specifically for deep-sea creatures. By responding through their own alternative and luminous communication system, these life forms are both sensitive and reactive to sound frequencies. Anti-Pop Consortium is invited to compose music exclusively for the deep-sea creatures through an innovative concert format, which will serve as the film’s original soundtrack. The music will be broadcast via probes, submarines and other sub-aquatic stations between -3500 and -5000 metros below sea level, to the real terra incognito.

Loris Gréaud at Yvon Lambert Gallery (Paris) in front of his installation A World of Absolute Relativity, photographed by Fahd El Jaoudi. Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert (Paris).

In a recent interview for Initiart Magazine, Loris Gréaud shared a few thoughts on the project: “There’s always a kind of back and forth between different fields. One of the key concepts of The Snorks is that I am not conceiving an object for the artwork and even less an object for anywhere… I don’t know the destination of the project. It is now becoming a film whose destination can be a theatre. But there are multi-aspects in the work, such as the concert can be played for humans like a regular hip-hop concert. The only thing is that all these have to respect the ideas that both the procedure and the process have to be experimental and have to adapt for every single project. That’s my concept of the adventure of art. I truly believe that the medium you choose have to follow the idea and you have to respect the process that makes the most sense of the original idea. So if I want to commit to such a project of making everything empirical, and be able to adapt the studio to meet the project’s requirements, I have to be independent in terms of finance, procedure and time. The idea of being in the adventure of art is not thinking about the economy of forms and ideas but being in a constant combustion!”

via -aconcertforcreatures.com and initiartmagazine.com