Julien Bellanger listens to the sound of trees. © Elsa Ferreira
The 8th edition of PIFcamp, a summer camp for hackers, makers, artists and other techno-explorers, was held from July 31 to August 6 in the Slovenian Alps. Julien Bellanger, co-founder of the Ping association in Nantes and head of development at Radio Jet FM, went along to capture PIFcamp’s site-specific soundscapes for Makery.
As a summer camp regular who has long organized Ping’s own Summerlab, Julien Bellanger is obsessed with documenting and archiving. In addition to visual, textual and video documentation already commissioned by the PIFcamp organizers, Julien added audio, “the poor part of the documentation,” as he puts it.
In the first two podcasts, Julien takes us on a sound journey through talks, workshops, shows, electronic and natural sounds that punctuated the camp. The result is an intense week condensed into 10 minutes or 1 hour, a sort of field recording that we aimlessly wander through, like a participant.
“There are lots of workshops, sometimes we miss things, sometimes we leave early, other times we stay till the end,” says Julien of this drifting movement.
In the podcast episode 3, Julien puts his recorder on shuffle mode via the Puredata software for a random and exploratory adventure.
We end with Bernhard Rasinger’s workshop on a frequency of 50Hz, a widespread voltage with a recognizable sound. Another opportunity to go over basic security when it comes to electricity.
Listen to Julien Bellanger’s show on art and research Sunday mornings from 10 AM to 12 PM on Radio Jet FM 91.2 FM in Loire-Atlantique, France, and on p-node Monday evenings at 10 PM.
Read our report on PIFcamp 2022 and Who’s-who of participants (part 1 and 2)
PIFcamp is part of the Feral Labs network and the cooperative project Rewilding Cultures co-funded by the Europe Creative programme of the European Union.