Collective JukeBox (Edit)

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557 artistes / artists
1487 œuvres sonores et musicales / music and sound works

Un projet organisé par Jérôme Joy et propulsé par ICI Éditions (Nice).
a project devised and set up by Jérôme Joy and propelled by ICI Éditions (Nice).

Consultez le site internet du projet : : (anciennement collectivejukebox.org) —

Video document Villa Arson Nice 2011

archives on archive.org

English version below

Le Collective JukeBox est un projet audio qui a débuté en 1996 et s'est clos en 2004. Actif durant ces années en tant que collection dynamique d'œuvres sonores et musicales modérée par leurs auteurs, ce projet est présenté aujourd'hui en tant qu'archive à l’occasion de l'exposition de l'été 2011, “Le Temps de l’Écoute”, au centre d'art de la Villa Arson, puisque depuis la version précédente présentée en 2004 le contenu de machine juke-box est complet (100 cds). Cette version 4.04 du projet présente et donne l’accès à l’intégralité des œuvres qui ont contribué au projet collectif depuis 1996. Depuis son lancement, le projet a pris différentes formes - d’une compilation audio à des formes d'intervention (diffusion outdoor, audiothèque), jusqu'à une machine juke-box à partir de 1998 (dont un dispositif a été acquis par le Frac PACA en 1999) -, tout en conservant la même idée de construction d’un dispositif collectif et coopératif en réseau ("collecticiel"), c'est-à-dire un programme de production et de diffusion d'œuvres sonores et musicales géré et nourri continuellement par les artistes. Ainsi chaque participant peut utiliser librement le système et mettre à jour ses contributions audio (ajouter, retirer, changer, modifier ou bien encore quitter le projet).

L'accès à cette archive est primordial, d'une part, pour écouter les œuvres sonores et musicales sur support d'une génération d'artistes, mais aussi d'une période historique marquée par le développement de l'audio-numérique et des réseaux électroniques, et, d'autre part, pour approcher un projet dont l'aspect collectif a été un principe permanent de construction et d'organisation, et un moteur exceptionnel de production (plusieurs œuvres ont été produites spécialement pour le projet) et de diffusion (certaines œuvres n'auraient jamais circulé sans le projet). Sans être attaché à un genre ou à une esthétique, le Collective JukeBox a participé à sa manière autant à l'activité de l'art sonore actuel qu'à celle des musiques alternatives et expérimentales, ou encore des musiques électroacoustiques, et ceci dans un rayonnement international et en mettant à jour des filiations et des croisements pertinents par la participation d’artistes des générations précédentes. Il a pu également accompagné les pratiques sonores récentes telles que celles de la phonographie (« field recording »), du « clicks and cuts », du « lowercase sound », du « microwave », « microsound », et « microscopic music », de l'electronica minimale et du « glitch », toutes fortement impliquées dans l'audio-numérique et le post-numérique (sur la base de techniques de déconstruction, de distorsion, d'erreurs (failures) jusqu'à la réappropriation de musiques ou de matériaux existants, et l’accroche sur les musiques populaires, etc.). Dans ce sens, le Collective JukeBox a relayé en quelque sorte d'autres projets historiques, plus documentaires et éditoriaux, comme ceux de William Furlong (Audio Arts cassettes, 1973-91) et de Maurizio Nannucci (Zona Archives, 1974- ca. 1985 principalement), ou encore de revues sonores actives lors des décennies précédentes (Aerial : A Journal in Sound (1990-1995), Radius : transmission from broadcast artists (1993-1998), Tellus Audio Cassette magazine (1983-1993), etc.). Un projet à venir et à construire est celui de concevoir un nouveau Collective JukeBox sur Internet.
(Jérôme Joy, présentation du projet Collective JukeBox, 2011)

1996 / 2004

Collective JukeBox is a free open audio "workspace" which began in 1996. Since the beginning, the project has taken different forms - from audio compilation to audio events, and since '98 to the development of a ‘networked’ juke-box project based on the concept of a "co-op system server" in parallel to the present "sound system" juke-box machine interface. The project was continuously evolving with different public interfaces ‘connected’ to the self-managed database (such as an audio repository). Its development and managing environment is based on a "groupware" and collective principle. As one goes along, the database is offering audio contents continuously updated and fed with the help of this co-op and ‘social’ system ("materialized" by the server's engine and the juke-box machine). This content can be easily extended to other interfaces such as an online free audio database, for instance. The contents are solely dependent on the participants, identified or unidentified, deliberately and intentionally. Collective JukeBox (CJ) is not an audio archive about soundart and music, neither a netlabel for mp3 musicians, but an "artel" (common cooperative).
(From Dorothee Richter, "Kompilationen & Databases", Kunstlerhaus Bremen, 2003)

The French composer Jérôme Joy has been concerned with building musical communities and with alternative forms of making music accessible. His “Collective Jukebox” project (started in 1996) involved building a jukebox that could play recordings by experimental musicians from around the world. He then asked people all over the planet to contribute recordings and to let their friends and acquaintances know about his open invitation. He did not curate the recordings; rather, he included everything that was sent to him. He wanted to create a kind of musical “commons,” where information from anyone who wanted to participate would be available. The jukebox has been installed in a series of art museums around Europe for the past eight years, where its music is available for the public to hear and explore. Jérôme Joy wants to create a place where people who are interested in listening to newer forms of sonic creativity can easily find that work. Joy’s work is an example of a composer trying to establish a new basis for musical and artistic community.
(Warren Burt, “Experimental Music in 2005”, In "World Music Today")

The unstoppable popularity of peer-to-peer networks and of millions of mp3 files exchanged every day cannot simply be reduced to the usual equation 'free=everyone wants it'. There is something more complex and wider-ranging that makes neophyte users constantly rack their brains over how to make hardware and software mechanisms work to access the 'celestial jukebox'. [...] Music is in fact contained not only in the safes of industry or the dusty ledgers of copyright associations but in everyone's home, via the myriad cds, vinyl discs and cassettes which together represent an enormous heritage of music. [...] The reward is not only 'obtaining' music but also taking part in an enormous collective process, as happens with a chat room, newsgroup or blog. Sharing one's files is thus no mere act of generosity or a gesture that it is hoped will encourage others to do the same, but an act of participation, proving one is part of a game, a process or a collective performance intended to liberate sounds and share them. As John Perry Barlow says, 'the more connected we become, the more obvious it is that we're all in this together': this is the culture of the net which is expanding rapidly, rewarding collective consciousness, expressed via the artistic heritage of musicians and which lives again in our memory. [...] Viewed in the abstract, the structure of a pc network with a large number of music files resembles that of a sort of huge sound machine able to satisfy most needs. This is the so-called 'Celestial Jukebox', an ideal machine able to reproduce almost any track recorded in the history of music.
[Artists intend people, other artists and musicians, to contribute to works] and this request for cooperation breaks down the traditional barriers between artist and audience. This direct interaction mingles the roles of 'creator' and 'user', thus enabling real development of ideas which draw their strength from the fact that they are created and approved by the public. And the notion of collective contribution is behind 'Collective Jukebox', an experiment inaugurated in 1996 by French composer Jérôme Joy, whose intention was to combine the spontaneous donation of tracks with public use independently of the limits ofspace and time of the artists involved. Joy's work in fact combines the infrastructures of the net with those of traditional art, inviting anyone wanting to take part to make their tracks available at a publicly accessible internet address. Periodically, he then organizes and exhibits them via a real jukebox with thousands of files which are used in some kind of public space, such as a museum or café.
Furthermore, the opportunity for reciprocal interaction opens further chances of processing carried out together with others, introducing a new social side into the production of sound. A musical artifact may indeed be the result of something done by more people than those normally in a band and so open up to an indefinite number of active participants who make a significant contribution to the final product. [...] It is the strategic key for the growth of contemporary culture, ready to take back the heritage of music which belongs to it.
(Alessandro Ludovico, "Peer-to-Peer : the collective, collaborative and liberated memory of sound", March 2003, part of the 'adonnaM.mp3 - Filesharing, the Hidden Revolution in the Internet' exhibition curated by Franziska Nori and the digitalcraft.org team into the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt, opened to the public from the 19th of March to the 20th of April 2003)

For the last thirty years at least, the use of the computer has allowed sound materials to become part of the processes of digital transformation, but it is only thanks to the widespread use of the Net that digital music can now be manipulated by so many people. While cultivating their listening activities, net users improve their musical skills to the point of being able to look for forms, map musical processes and bring out meanings by putting together heterogeneous elements. It is therefore quite possible that simultaneous sharing in heterogeneous musical communities promotes – without excluding some degree of confusion – more opportunities for interpretation. [One can look into a project] that constructs cultural spaces against the background of a critical analysis of artistic practices within the frame of net-interactive technologies. Jérôme Joy's evolving co-operative audio database, Collective JukeBox, is open to all contributors and is activated by their ‘engagement’ through sending unlimited audio contributions and evaluating proposed interfaces. It functions as a forum, and its participants can make proposals to modify the project. Just as the creator of Collective JukeBox, composer Jérôme Joy expects his project to open ‘a new resistant space for digital audio emergent practices’. [...] Joy envisages participation in an artistic context as an exchange between subjects within a collective dimension. [...] Collective JukeBox is a dynamic, collective endeavour, ‘a continuously evolutionary and updated resource’. Referring to his own projects, Joy offers further considerations regarding the peculiar effect of net technologies on artistic practices and on listening spaces.
[...] Starting from a more theoretical frame, Joy analyses the shift between languages, reality and identity of artistic practices. According to Joy, the practices of artistic presentation and the conditions that rule the diffusion of artworks no longer seem adequate to ‘languages’ developed nowadays, especially those using elements that are more and more dematerialised and free from the ‘principles of reality.’ Joy states that the fields of artistic inquiry tend to be displaced, while presenting themselves more often in the shape of ‘device,’ than in the form of ‘laboratory’ or ‘platform.’ There is a process of adaptation that opens new spaces to artistic practices and requires them to be reformulated. In fact, without being too explicit, they infiltrate peripheral domains (computer science, communication, social relations) and thus modify their identity. [...] Joy's strategy is that of planning a device characterized by different forms and functions : « an audio compilation, an audio intervention group, a networked jukebox. The project is continuously evolutive with various public and ‘work’ interfaces, and its system of development is really close to a system of ‘groupware’. Collective JukeBox began on Internet for building the network of contacts between a lot of artists (and non-artists) to build a place of exchange and of conversation, and very quickly, the project requested the construction of interfaces for the exchanges and for public netcasting & shows. These interfaces have first appeared in ‘real world’ with actions and a listening interface : a CD-player juke-box, which represents today the ‘sound-system’ of the project, before the finalization of the next ‘internet-system’. There is no selection for participating, and the project is now invested by many and many artists. Those ones take part in freely by sending to the project their audio and musical contributions, and the Collective JukeBox Project ensures their visibility and listening. The free mode of consultation and sine qua non activation by the listeners allow the construction of a user-friendly space for the public, as a cafe or a cafeteria or an ‘audio-lounge,’ with the jukebox machine. The project opens not only a ‘forum-room’ and a space of ‘monitor’ (a monitor on sound art and music), but also a permanent laboratory and workshop ».
The initiative of Jérôme Joy (which follows the ‘bazaar’ or ‘autonomous zone’ models) tends to favour the achievement of a cultural autonomy and of an adaptive/cooperative organisation, since he is firmly convinced that they can be mutually supportive. According to Joy, the Collective JukeBox project could provide a model of a new economy (associated with these new methods of artistic work), which could cooperate or coexist with the existing and legitimated commercial systems (here those of the music industry, the art market and artistic institutionalisation) without seeming to be an element of pirating (copyright violation).
Besides conditioning the formation of semantic spaces, the scattering of communication on the Internet, the multiplication of production-reception chains, the exchange of role between maker and listener and the peculiarity of online musical applications can give rise to an artificial plurality of musical spaces, constituted through options of cultural ‘localisation.’ Consequently, we should ask ourselves whether the appearance of artificial features of musical spaces is going to be an addition to, or simply a replacement of the ‘natural’ ones.
(Dante Tanzi, “Musical Experience and Online Communication”, In 'Crossings : ejournal of Art and Technology' Vol.3 Issue 1, Dec. 2003, Trinity College (publ.), Dublin)