Laurent Montaron's Analog Machines as Ghostly Representations

Laurent Montaron's work explores analog technologies as both subject and medium, revealing the paradoxes of recording and reproduction. His photograph The Stream (2007) depicts a young man recording a mountain stream with a Nagra, allegorizing how analog capture fixes ephemeral flow into reproducible code. Montaron's installations, such as Silent Key (2009) and BALBVTIO (2009), foreground the devices themselves—hidden microphones, dual projections, and looped films—to expose the impossibility of transparent transmission. He calls these 'ready made aidés,' after Duchamp, where machines like a polyhedral speaker emitting an orchestra tuning to a telephone tone (Sans titre, 2006) or a wall-embedded synthesizer mimicking wind (Bruit blanc, 2006) become opaque presences. The artist draws on Friedrich Kittler's analysis of perceptual shifts in Grammophon, Film, Typewriter and references Heraclitus's river fragment to underscore the contradiction of recording flux. Montaron's work, curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud of Centre Pompidou, includes pieces like Melancholia (2005) and Pace (a 16mm projection of a carp heartbeat behind glass), echoing Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography. Recent shows include Frac Champagne-Ardenne (2009), IAC Villeurbanne (2009), Kunsthaus Basel (2010), Centre Clark Montreal (2010), and Galerie schleicher + lange in Paris (2011) and Berlin (2012).