“My final report before landing is now complete.
We are on automatic pilot, in the hands of the computer.
I have tucked my crew in for a long sleep and will soon be joining them.
In less than an hour, our six months off Cape Kennedy will come to an end.
Six months in deep space by our time at least.
According to Dr. Hasslein's theory of time during light speed travel, the earth will have aged almost 700 years since we left it while we have barely aged at all.
Maybe!
What is probably true is that the men who sent us on this journey are long dead.
You who read my words today are a different species.
A better species I hope.
I leave the 20th century with no regrets but one last thing if anyone is listening to me at least, nothing scientific, this is purely personal.
From here everything looks different.
Time is curved, space is infinite.
It crushes the human ego.
I feel alone.
That's about it.
Tell me though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox that sent me to visit the stars, still fight his brother?
Does he still let his neighbour's children starve to death?”
Excerpt from remarks made by the character Taylor in his spaceship at the beginning of the feature film Planet of the Apes, Schaffner, 1968.
In 1968, Schaffner gave the world a final sequence in his version of Planet of the Apes, where Taylor (Charlton Heston) and Nova (Lina Harrison), discover that the wild beach they find themselves on is none other than the old American northeast coast: half-buried in the sand, the statue of Liberty is the only remnant of the long-gone city of New York. The planet on which the astronauts landed is indeed Earth.
Today, we too are on our knees on the beach, just like the protagonist in the film.
The statue of Liberty corroded and then crumbled, and ended up being washed away.
Plage blanche, maybe it is this beach.
Plage blanche is an open curatorial web platform, which proposes to everyone to occupy the space-time of one minute, freely, with the sound medium. It is an invitation to record, publish and/or listen to an infinite number of ways of “taking part”, via a temporal unit of common use in the earthly world. It is also an invitation to share, to invite in turn one or more people close to us (whatever their mastery of the sound tool) to spread their singularity, as materials for tomorrow.
The economy of means is, in Plage blanche, an aesthetic bias. The constraint acts as a creative motor and the design is exposed to an awareness.
This type of design approach renews the imagination
The website's interface was designed to enhance the value of the contribution, notably through the importance given to the form, which occupies a third of the screen and is almost omnipresent.
On the other hand, there is little room for graphic enhancements, and none for images.
The website's space is dedicated to sound, text and colour. Colour, as much as sound, characterises each published sound piece. White is the default colour of a web page (if no colour is assigned, the background will be white). So is the paper of the writing page, as long as it is blank of signs. In this sense, Plage blanche is also an invitation to colour: one leaves one's own, just as one leaves a sound imprint.
There is also the idea of spending time. It's not necessarily a problem not to immediately understand how a website works, it depends at stakes.
Plage blanche is a website to wander around.
For ecological reasons, we have limited the size of the files to 5Mo and have adopted the .mp3 format.
If you have a sound file in another format (.wav/.flac/.mpeg/.mov/.m4a/.aac/...) you can for example use the free SoundConverter tool to convert your file into mp3.
A proposal by Marine Froeliger, made possible and enriched via the graphic design and development of Marjorie Ober, 2021.
Licence to publish sound creations: Creative Commons CC BY-SA.
Font: Happy Times in the IKOB, Lucas Le Bihan, SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, 2018.
CMS : GRAV
Contact : bonjour[at]marinefroeliger[dot]fr