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Yann Seznec

Design / Digital, Multidisciplinary, Multidisciplinary Art, Multimedia, Music / Sound, Performance, Visual / Media

Awards Received

Independent Artist

2021

About the Artist

Yann Seznec is an artist whose work focuses on sound, music, physical interaction, games, and building new instruments. Recent projects include residencies at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the Floating Cinema in London, Playable City Lagos, and Timespan in the Scottish Highlands. He has performed at The Roundhouse London, Mutek Montreal, Melbourne Recital Hall, Liquid Rooms Tokyo, Köln Philharmonie, Fak’ugesi Johannesburg, and more. Much of his work involves building custom instruments such as musical pigsties, slinky instruments, candle-based sound installations, electromechanical mushroom spore reactors, and more. He is founder of BAFTA-winning creative studio Lucky Frame. In December 2015 he received the British Composer Award for Sonic Art for his 2014 Edinburgh Art Festival work “Currents”. Yann has been Game Designer in Residence at the MICA Game Lab in Baltimore, Maryland, since 2019. This residency runs until August 2021.

Yann Seznec website Website

Featured Work

Photos

In 2015 I completed a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington DC. The focus of my residency was the sound of travel, and how this is reflected in memory, history, and cultural identity. I spent several months recording and editing the sounds of rare aircraft, as well as digitizing analog recordings from the archive. I used these recordings to develop a series of screen printed spectrograms which I titled Sound Signatures. Each step of the printing process became symbolic of the way that we remember sound, as a representation of an instantaneous moment that can not really be recreated.

Videos

  • The Book of Knowledge of Impractical Musical Devices

    See more information about The Book of Knowledge of Impractical Musical Devices
    Loosely based on the 12th century Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by the Islamic engineer Al-Jazari, this project was focused on the design and development of three experimental sonic objects and musical instruments that each took a conceptual limitation to a logical conclusion, thereby raising questions about the place of digital media, sound, and technology in our lives.
    Volume 1 is a rhythm generator which changes patterns every day. It uses a sound library that was itself recorded in a single day. The previous day’s patterns will never be recreated.
    Volume 2 is a GPS-based granular synthesizer. It will sound different depending on where it is in the world, as most of the parameters are set by the GPS data.
    Volume 3 is a listening device which slowly, but permanently, destroys the sound that it contains. The only copy of the recording is in this device, so each time it is played it is simultaneously lost forever.
    The project is fully open source, conceptually and technically. Each volume is accompanied by an essay detailing the idea behind the design, as well as a full set of technical resources for building your own.
    Medium: Sound Art
    Year: 2019

  • Currents

    See more information about Currents
    Currents is an installation and performance built from hundreds of discarded computer fans. They are programmed to recreate the wind levels of other locations from around the world. It is a meditation on the role that technology has on our lives; how it is used to connect the world, how much importance we place on these connections yet how easily we discard the very objects that connect us.
    2014, Edinburgh Art Festival, Southbank Centre London, and Glasgow Concert Halls
    Currents was awarded the British Composer Award for Sonic Art in 2014.
    Year: 2014

  • jumpSynth

    See more information about jumpSynth
    A trampoline-based portable synthesizer for making noise in the woods alone. Built as part of my research for my position as Game Designer in Residence at MICA Game Lab.
    Year: 2020

  • deathIncrease

    See more information about deathIncrease
    An instrument/installation that plays a number of fragments of prayer requests about COVID-19 that people have uploaded to YouTube. The number of fragments is the number of people who died the previous day in America (in the database I am using this is called the ‘deathIncrease’).
    Year: 2020