Franck Vigroux & Antoine Schmidt 'Tempest' NZ Shows Announced

French multimedia artists Franck Vigroux and Antoine Schmidt are bringing their cosmically inspired audio / visual performance work Tempest to Aotearoa in November, for a pair of headline events at Tāmaki Makaurau's Audio Foundation and Pōneke's Pyramid Club. Combining the skills of musician / composer Vigroux and installation artist Schmitt, Tempest promises to engulf audiences in senses-dazzling analog sonics and algorithmic animations, offering an experiential equivalent to the primordial moments after the Big Bang and creating "a real system-universes of pure chaos, that can be seen in the movements of millions of particles and can be heard through the roaring of air." The pair are also bringing their mesmerising Chronostasis work to Aotea Square for a free public event on 8th November (starting 8.30pm) – blast your eyes and ears back to the dawn of time at the dates below...

Franck Vigroux & Antoine Schmidt (FR)
Wednesday 6th November - Audio Foundation, Auckland
Thursday 7th November - Pyramid Club, Wellington
Tickets available HERE via UTR

Experience footage of Franck Vigroux and Antoine Schmitt's Tempest from a recent performance in Paris...

Press release:

Just after the big bang, the universe was completely shapeless, filled with matter and energy, but irregularities were born , which became atoms, suns and planets...Within the primitive soup on Earth, indistinct molecules started to group as bacterias, to become life, animals, humans... Tempest recreates the sound and fury of these original maelstroms within which it searches for the origin of form, it looks for other forms.

An audio and visual performance, Tempest associates the analog instruments of Franck Vigroux with the visual algorithms of Antoine Schmitt, to create a real system-universes of pure chaos, that can be seen in the movements of millions of particles and can be heard through the roaring of air.

By manipulating the internal forces of this chaos, the performers give birth to audio and visual shapes that develop in time, with more or less stability, more or less evidence.

“Antoine Schmitt and Franck Vigroux’s performance, which had the much simpler and more sensual aim of simulating the big bang, packed a greater affective punch, sending the seated audience through a roller-coaster like experience through a combination of cinematic sound swells and the movement of tiny star-like dots across a pitch black screen.”- The Fader

French musician/composer Franck Vigroux is a multifaceted artist whose works range from electro-acoustic and experimental electronic music to modern composition, improvisation, radio works, avant rock, and beyond. Primarily known as a guitar player, he also manipulates electronics and turntables, and has composed works for contemporary classical ensembles. He is equally prolific as a solo artist and as a collaborator, and has worked with Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Mika Vainio, Reinhold Friedl (Zeitkratzer), and numerous others. Franck Vigroux ‘s music is made of tectonic tensions, beats, electronic textures and a very personal approach to sonic exploration. Vigroux’s uniqueness comes from his artistic approach that integrates new media and performing arts. He designs transdisciplinary shows and audiovisual concerts, collaborating with visual artists such as Antoine Schmitt and Kurt d’Haeseleer. Vigroux’s records have been published on such as DAC Records, Leaf, Cosmo Rhythmatic, Monotype, Radio France, Erototox, Aesthetical.

Installation artist, Antoine Schmitt creates artworks in the form of objects, installations and situations to address the processes of movement in all of their modalities, and question their intrinsic conceptual problematics, of plastic, philosophical or social nature. Heir of kinetic art and cybernetic art, nourished by metaphysical science-fiction, he endlessly interrogates the dynamic interactions between human nature and the nature of reality. Originally programming engineer in human computer relations and artificial intelligence, he places the program, a contemporary artistic material and unique by its active quality, at the core of most of his artworks, to reveal and literally manipulate the forces at stake. Antoine Schmitt has also undertaken an articulation of this approach with more established artistic fields like music, dance, architecture, literature or cinema, and has collaborated with Franck Vigroux, Atau Tanaka, Vincent Epplay, Jean-Jacques Birgé, Delphine Doukhan, K.Danse, Patrice Belin, Don Nino, Cubenx, Alberto Sorbelli, Matthew Bourne, Hortense Gauthier… As theoretician, speaker and editor of the gratin.org portal, Antoine Schmitt explores the field of programmed art.