The fourth edition of Issy-Les-Moulineaux‘s Le Cube festival has been an excellent occasion to present a panorama of current forms of digital artistic expressions as well as give easy access keys to a wider audience. A choice that also included itself into a reflection on public space, symbolized by a week-end long multimedia urban game.
Listening to music in a horizontal position has always something relaxing. But when this listening uses Sonic Bed from English artist Kaffe. Matthews, the pleasant experience finds some intimate and addictive extension. In this very special bed, users can hear the music - a Kaffe Matthews’s theremin original score - by a system of speakers set into the wooden structure around. But they can feel vibrations too coming from contact points placed into the mattress. A tactile, physical listening, but also an immersive and convivial experience, in which Sonic Bed perfectly translates innovation, accessibility and play spirit that emerges from the fourth edition of Le Cube festival.
This rendez-vous, that celebrates yearly the lasting activism of Le Cube’s dedication to digital creation - a unique venue in France and located in Issy-Les-Moulineaux - as well as its will to reach the wider audience, made the most of its 2010 edition to transform its exhibition space and to give a better overview of digital art and culture within the city welcoming it. With about twenty digital works on its program, Le Cube has chosen to highlight all forms of digital art and, above all, different ways for the audience to appropriate them: generative Works that fascinate by their unpredictable sense, interactive and participative installations, immersive spaces that seem to stop time, and of course a kids zone that stresses out the high educational Le Cube’s aim.
Play installations
In the immersive category, Anharmonium’s orthophonic experience of italian artist Tez was one of the most interesting. Invited to get into a closed meditative space, small numbers of visitors have to face an audiovisual project linking laser projection and water vibrations into a receptacle. Infrasound and ultrasound transductors turn water into a fluid able to react to sound, a fluid then transformed in sound modulations broadcast by a 4.1 system while surface of the water, topped by a mirror, reflects laser on the wall in a luminous kaleidoscopic ballet. On a more interactive level, transforming images on the screen was the leading point of Adrien M’s Chronotrope, in which every spectator is allowed to observe distorsion of one’s move due to a slight interval between captured image and its restitution, and of Mehmet Atken’s Body Paint, in which spectators bodies turn into a giant brush, filling the screen with layers of vivid colours painting. A play mise-en-scene that also showed through Squidsoup collective‘s Glowing Pathfinder bug sandbox, where holograms of creeping bugs have to be connected by digging paths if you want to see them turning into flying butterflies. More sensitive, Dan Roosegaard’s installation Lotus 7.0 was set as a wall of intelligent metal leaves lighting up and retracting when people came closer. A kind of behavioral installation that was also the key point of Hugo Verlinde’s Boréale in which spectator’s detection was the condition to materialize moving luminous points on a screen. A poetic approach that could be seen as well in surrealistic’s cadavres exquis and interactive frames of Jérémie Dress’s Paroles de…, in which voice strength can make funny and sometimes absurd blocks of texts appear or disappear. Or in the automatic cuts of microphone-recorded messages from the Lab 212’s Histoires Exquises.
Performances and public space
Besides installations, a performing dimension was also brought to special consideration. Tasting of informed cocktails, concocted by Maël Le Mée from organic oranges connected with music by a flash drive key, meeting with artists and thinkers of prospective society, and mostly technological concerts like the one of Atau Tanaka and Adam Parkinson for four Iphones, were an important part of the festivities. But the most important thing was probably the intervention on public space carried out by Le Cube through its week-end long multimedia urban game. This was definitely a good way to stress out the importance of digital stakes for tomorrow without losing the play option of the festival. Thanks to the Issy 3D software, the city of Issy-Les-Moulineaux already benefits from a virtual navigation technology. By using this one and a certain number of QR codes scattered in the city, a bunch of people - mostly families - armed with mobile phones were then able to start discovering differently their own territory, trying to solve enigmas and making funny actions. An interactive exploration of the city that relevantly tended to show that for Le Cube, virtual world as it is often described for tomorrow is already a today’s reality.
LAURENT CATALA
Web Site:
< www.cubefestival.com >
Published in the Digitalarti Mag #4.
Digitalarti Mag, the international digital art and innovation magazine.
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