Yann Beauvais
A little something in another context - Within another context…
(excerpt, p. 101-102)


We know eRikm mainly for his musical oeuvre as turntablist and sound performer; but we are less well acquainted with his visual work, in which video has been in the ascendancy since 2007, even if he began using it in the early 2000s.
Among other features, his musical pieces resort to low-budget Kaoss Pad samplers annularly arranged to form a loop that creates feedback out of nothing except maybe itself (1) and tends to eliminate the original sound component. In eRikm's visual pieces we find a similarity of attitude and touch, with an emphasis on short sequences or fragments “digitally explored in terms of the disembodiment, fragmentation and generational synthesis of one or more elements. (2)” Several of his videos explore the idea of the deletion – the disappearance – of the partial data he offers, via transformation systems as random as they are unlikely; we are often left to deal with an instability that denies us any recourse to a figurative or narrative element. Faced with these kinds of systems, we sift through them and try to understand what happens in each case, with the diversity of operations and the plasticity of the recordings tending to sidetrack us, according to how much the information has been degraded.
Videos have a special importance for eRikm, as was clear in two recent exhibitions (3) that highlighted his visual side with a host of installations, drawings, photos and sculptures. The pieces on show underscored the artist's concern with the visual aspect of his work and with creation of environments as much as of specific objects. On today's scene the visual element often underpins a musician's work by filling out the performance space: as if sound were not enough and needs to be backed up with virtuoso, spectacular or monumental visual input. But eRikm's use of video and projection has a deliberately non-spectacular edge, which builds into each work the possibility of not being understood or appropriately perceived; this is demandingly the case of “aUTOPORTRAIT ”, to which I shall return later, and also – in a similar but distinctive way – “va©uum”, whatever the form of its presentation.