On a Friday night in central London, 176 shelled gastropods “dance” around me. Few times before has a ballet moved so slowly – but then it’s not often that the choreography is performed by snails. I tread lightly on the cling film-covered floor; with every air bubble that pops beneath my feet, I fear the worst. There’s been one casualty of the night so far, as a snail lies broken in the middle of the room, its final wriggles illuminated by an LED light on its back.
Its demise is being live-scored to a stretched-out, 47-minute long looping rendition of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, played at 35 BPM – the tempo of a snail’s heartbeat. The whole thing may sound like a Trent Reznor studio experiment (Nine Inch Snails, if you will), but this is in fact Slow Pixel, an interactive art installation that urges its audience to take life at a snail’s pace.
“They are the DJs, they are the dancers, the performers, they are the stars,” says Elizabeth Saint-Jalmes, 40. She and Cyril Leclerc, 43, are the Parisian artists behind the shelled orchestra; the performance is an extension of the duo’s avant-garde musical project PP + BL, Pigeon Pourri + Bisou Love. Their minimalistic approach to music is one that uses time and space to create dual moments of reflection and, at times, unease.
I meet Saint-Jalmes and Leclerc a few days after the show has been wrapped up and the slime mopped from the floor. I’m told the snails are now safely relaxing in their King’s Cross hotel room, savouring the final hours of their city break before catching a late-afternoon Eurostar back to Paris.
Housed in Kings Place as part of Cryptic’s Sonica weekender, the UK debut of Slow Pixel saw each snail fitted with a diode connected to a light-sensitive sensor, so that their movements trigger changes to the soundscape. “The people in the space, the audience, they change the sounds,” explains Leclerc.
An audience member placing their hand over a diode may control a filter, or as a snail edges closer to a speaker, a creeping bass rumble may brim from below. Video footage shot by the couple during their travels on the Trans-Siberian Express plays on a projector, delivering a distorted whooshing effect when a particularly bright scene floods the room with light. Switching the lights on at the end of a performance creates “an explosion of noise,” says Leclerc, where “everything is triggered to 100 percent.”
Scattered across the room, the light shining from each individual snail turns the darkened space into a miniature night sky cityscape; “a little big bang” as Saint-Jalmes describes it. Triangular structures, decorated with snails, are dotted around the room and create sweeping crescendos of sound when they’re rearranged.
“It’s like we’re creating cities that we can explore and change,” explains Saint-Jalmes. “We can take an object with snails on, place it somewhere else and change the shape of the sound.”
These changes in sound are felt by the snails themselves. “They have no hearing but they are sensitive to the sound vibrations,” says Leclerc. He compares it to how you would feel the bass kick against your chest in a nightclub.
“They like having their feet massaged so when it's very bassy they can feel the vibrations,” says Saint-Jalmes. “When it's too much, on the speakers for example, they don't like it. It's too strong.”
“We won't try dubstep,” adds Leclerc.
Why Nirvana, specifically? “Well, when I was a teenager I was a huge fan of Nirvana, but we also wanted to call [the work’s composed score] ‘Snails Like Teen Spirit’ ” laughs Saint-Jalmes. “So it was really because of the name.”
“But in this piece we deal with the idea of slowing down from our culture,” she continues. “So to take a huge cultural piece of rock and roll and slow it down is a very simple application of one of our ideas for this piece.”
In a former life, the 176 performers in Slow Pixel were destined to be French cuisine. As members of the gros-gris species, a particularly appetising snail due to their large body size at around 40-45mm, they were almost designed to be served as finger food or sucked from their shells over carafes of wine. But these lucky snails have people queuing to see them perform, not to order them from restaurants.
Read more: Gastropod love triangle: mutant snail Jeremy single again after his suitors mate with each other
Saint-Jalmes says that they can be tempestuous beings. “They run, they fall asleep, they just don't care,” she says. She sports a silver pinky ring in the shape of a snail.
For some, however, the weekend's performance was their grand finalé. “We lost three,” says Saint-Jalmes. “When you're working with living creatures there is always a risk."
The remaining snails will be released in the countryside after returning to Paris. In true pop star fashion, they’ll be set free in the south of France, spending their remaining days enjoying the good life in sun-kissed wine country.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
