SENE - JunQ

JunQ - or ‘Journal of unsolved Questions’- is modelled on a parallel exercise: to score sculptures while sketching music, in a conjoined effort to dispel the woes of isolation. Designed like a Debordian RPG game, the architecture of JunQ can be penetrated from any end, like a wave that never breaks, a continuous loop forward. JunQ is a collaborative language that binds the algorithm of an artificial pop star and the performance of the artist himself. Real imitates ‘fake’ in a chain of infection and sublimation; the ultimate romance between analog evolution and digital experimentation.

The story opens on the ethereal song of sirens, beckoning us on.
Vocals are composed like instruments, a chorus of fantastical beasts providing sound cues in the atmospheric wanderings of the LP. A haunting banshee, the monstrous growl of an Orc, are met with sharp violins and muffled harpsichord to form an orchestra for the New Babylon. Sounds are never used for their default function; they are sculpted, distorted, amplified, to become hybrids. The tension between guttural bass-lines and titillating cymbals turn generic samples of classical instruments into sound archetypes for the future. Distant dance-hall reverberations delimitate a vibrant ‘jungle’ of sound that is open to its user’s interpretation.

Erwan Sene is a protean artist and musician based in Paris.
His composite body of work is led by a sculptural practice that unfolds on several levels, reprising, digesting and warping the objects that surround him.
He creates polyphonous mise-en-scènes, between baroque remanence and domestic surrealism, that address themes of contamination, idiopathy and science fiction.

The JunQbook is a visual immersion depicted at a microscopic scale; an encrypted rulebook to decipher the JunQspace.
Each page dives into the neon structures of Cronenberg-like mutations: miniatures, models, ventilation details echo the micro-evolutions of Sene’s ‘imaginary mundane’.
Appropriating the devices of the COVID-19 lockdown, Sene sought to conjure the entrapment of infection, staging its distorted biotope as a friend, rather than a foe.
The sensuality of fragmentation and the saturation of nuclear tones are the instruments of his personal entropy.

The book features a bespoke type that evokes notions of archeology and of civilisations hidden inward - providing a faux-real scripture to its multi-fold universe.
This type was designed in collaboration with Marie Mam-Sai Bellier and Marine Stephan.

You have entered the world of JunQ
An open-ended quest for wanton wanderers,
Our wayward expedition holds limitless possibilities

JunQ is a game that warps the fabric of reality
Scratching, cutting - TRICKING - its way into its own fragmented zone

JunQ is a terminal for fantasy
A modular solution to the dread of isolation

JunQ is an archeology of solitude set to an infectious beat

Successive reverberations create infinite computations:
The texture of our journey is a flight - frenetic, then surrendered
Throughout, a wordless voice, a song of a siren, calls the objective of our mission
Mapping territories of control and chaos

JunQ is collaborative language
A digital spell cast to conjure an artificial pop star
‘One voice to rule them all- and in the deep-web bind them’
One voice to emulate ‘humanity’ - a virtual Pinocchio for a post-human world

You access the JunQspace at your own will
Its codes are cryptic, tailored to the ANARCHI-tecture of the mind
We provide the outline, you generate the rest

Huge and full of absence, the JunQspace follows no rules
Derived from the Shuffle generation, it can be approached from any end
Ventilation, doors, windows, grids, are scars of property, relics of delimitated space
PRISONS OF PHYSICAL CONTEMPT

JunQ is the place where artificial expression meets analog pastiche

JunQ stages conversations with the ‘Ghost in our Shell’:
‘Faux old/ Real new’
‘Real’ completes ‘fake’ in an unstoppable chain of infection and sublimation

If you listen close enough, can you hear its heart-beat?
Can you grasp at the longing that lies beyond the code?

The plot hungers for a breath of fresh air
Bacteria blooming everywhere

The ghost of dance-hall echoes
Sounds of glass and streams,
Growls of Orcs and Banshees, shrieking - forever forward
Voicing hybrid exaltations of ESCAPE