Light Brown Noise (Zimoun Edition)

A new video of a new Zimoun installation is always a treat, and this large scale one from the Musée d’Arts de Nantes in France does not disappoint. At this phase in Zimoun’s expansive career, video documentation is as much a part of his work as are the installations themselves. This brief new footage, just over a minute long, is edited to display his characteristic array of inexpensive materials put to pattern-generating use, the result a gentle rainstorm rendered as a product of geometric beauty. Each of its 528 boxes contains a single cotton ball on a loose metal cable connected at the box’s base to a rudimentary motor that is held in place by a wooden plank. The cables are just long enough that the balls seem to hover over the grid, bouncing along the edges of the cardboard enclosures. Based on the close-ups in the video, this was shot early in the exhibit’s run (it has just started this past week), because the cardboard shows little to no wear from the constant motion. Presumably there will be more cumulative texture by the end of the run, on March 1, 2026 (nantesmetropole.fr).

A few months in advance of the Musée d’Arts de Nantes exhibit, Zimoun posted a video of a single one of these boxes, back when it was, presumably, still in prototype mode. The box’s closing flaps were yet to be removed. In the above video, from :39 to :41, you can see a strand of the cardboard coming loose from where the flaps were trimmed.

At first the structure of the museum installation confused me. The brief description at the start of the video lists, characteristically, its components: “528 prepared do-motors, cotton balls, cardboard boxes 40x40x60 cm, 2025.” The video’s opening wide view suggests it as a square, but there is no simple square root of 528. If the number of boxes was 529, this would be assumed to be a grid of 23 x 23 boxes. Then I noticed that from :54 to :56 in the video you can see it is laid out, in fact, as a triangle. A still image on the museum’s website shows this as well.