1. Continuing On
adjective “prepared” describing the DC motors that he brings together in these pieces recall the pianos that John Cage began to prepare in 1938 by inserting various objects between the strings of his instruments. In preparing his pianos, the American composer anticipated the unexpected sounds whose sonorities he appreciated, as a result of the controlled form of chance that these interpretations created. “Through prototyping, totally unexpected results sometimes show up and can influence the whole process as well”, [40] Zimoun told Marco Mancuso in 2011. There is also a kind of controlled randomness in the work of the Swiss artist. The part of control is attributable to the positioning, with extreme preci-
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sion, of the motors that he assembles, by tens, by hundreds, on the floors or walls of the architecture that his work reveals. This is also the case with the cardboard boxes that make up minimal sculptures whose forms interact with those of the spaces in which he sets up his installations. The randomness emerges from the non-perfection of the cables and from the minute variations between the cork balls that his motors tirelessly animate. A single motorized module might attract our attention, perhaps disturbing us like drops of water escaping from a leaking tap. But all together, they compose a flow comparable to Dominique Moulon
the regular and calming noise of a driving rain. The notion of flux is also very present in the work of John Cage who is one of the founding fathers of what is now called the practice of Sound Art. Notably through the performance Variation VII he gave in 1966 in New York with David Behrman, Lowell Cross, Antony Gnasso and David Tudor, a performance where the signals coming from