Synchronisation vs synchronicity
Of animal music and man’s uselessness. About an installation by Robin Meier
Bastien Gallet
Synchronicity. That is the title of an installation by Robin Meier submitting two thousand fireflies and a dozen grasshoppers to a complex synchronisation apparatus (“dispositif”). A commission of Audemars Piguet realised in collaboration with André Gwerder for Art Basel 2015, Synchronicity does not produce any actual synchronicity, but displays a process in which fireflies and will become as much the subjects as the agents of the experiment. The audible and visible musicality of this installation is not the result of a musical setting of the animals, it consists on the contrary in the unpredictable character of their reactions to the apparatus. The biological and ethological knowledge necessary for the implementation of the installation is thus foiled by them. To say it in the words of Gilbert Simondon: as they imperfectly synchronise, they individuate themselves.
