Floriane Pochon
Radio artist and sound director Floriane Pochon has been working for almost a decade with prestigious collaborators such as writer Alain Damasio and French video game veteran Éric Chahi.
Updated on 12/10/2021
5 min
After working at Marseille's cultural and community radio station Radio Grenouille, in 2008 Floriane Pochon launched the Nuits de la Phaune project, a sound experiment that focuses on animality and strange sounds recorded in nature. With a notion of experimental and ecological radio, in 2013 she founded Phaune Radio alongside Amélie Agut and Tony Regnauld. An internet radio station that broadcasts twenty-four hours a day, it creates its own unclassifiable universe, halfway between field recording and haunting melodies.
Since 2014, Floriane Pochon has also been collaborating with science fiction novelist Alain Damasio for the website Tarabust. More recently, she worked on the sound design for Paper Beast, a VR video game by veteran designer Éric Chahi, named as the best video game universe at the Pégases awards in March 2021.
Provoking a "wild listening" experience, or building "audio ecosystems": Floriane Pochon enjoys acting as an audio-naturalist who trawls beaches and forests in search of sounds to collect. In 2007, realising that Radio Grenouille's FM waves were mainly broadcast over a portion of the Mediterranean surrounding Marseille, she decided with her partners to subtly adjust the programming of Nuits de la Phaune to adapt it to its main audience: plankton.
Since then, she has been working with a small team of volunteers to make Phaune Radio an inventive listening space, which decentres the listener by reconnecting them to the richness of the natural world around them. The aim is to create different forms of listening that thwart our expectations.
Since 2014, Floriane Pochon has been collaborating on sound compositions with science fiction writer Alain Damasio for the Tarabust website. These are all prospective journeys, utopian drifts sometimes soothing or slightly disturbing, like Phonophore, a transmedia exploration around the novel Les Furtifs. In Montreal, where she lived for three years, Floriane Pochon collaborated with Eric Chahi on Paper Beast.
This critically acclaimed virtual reality video game, released in 2020, immerses the player in a dreamlike universe populated by paper creatures. Unlike the radio format, which is based on linearity, the sound design approach to an interactive experience implies dynamic sound rendering, which adapts to each action of the player. It's a way for Floriane Pochon to explore other facets of sound immersion: this year, she will also be presenting as part of the Arles VR residencies.
- 2006
2006
Arrival at Radio Grenouille.
- 2007
2007
Creation of the Nuits de la Phaune.
- 2013
2013
Launch of Radio Phaune, internet radio station.
- 2014
2014
Start of a collaboration with Alain Damasio for the Tarabust website.
- 2020
2020
Paper Beast, by Pixel Reef, sound design by Floriane Pochon.
Floriane Pochon participated in the VR Writing Residency, organised by the VR Arles Festival, dedicated to creating immersive experiences between August 23 and 28 in Arles. This residency was supported by the Institut français.