One of the emblematic events of the Fresnoy National Contemporary Arts Studio is the annual Panorama exhibit. Panaroma 12, open until July 25th, in Tourcoing, is the opportunity to get to know this unique French training and production space. It was founded by its current director, Alain Fleischer, in 1987. A cross between "high-tech Villa Medici", "electronica Bauhaus", and an "Institute for Musical/Acoustic Research and Coordination for the visual arts" Alain Fleischer’s development of the Fresnoy has been entirely unique. For him, "the critical stage of this learning process is the stage of real production". Students and teachers create and expose a specific project each of year during school’s two year curriculum.
Crossing of disciplines
What is different about the Fresnoy is that here, disciplines are crossed, pieces are produced with professional equipment, and faculty is regularly rejuvenated by guest professors from among the most widely recognized creators on the contemporary scene. The two year program is financially accessible (enrolment fees of 760 Euros per year). The selection is open to international students with a Masters degree (or equivalent) who are under 35 years of age (or with 7 years of professional experience). Candidates are short listed based first based on applications and portfolio, and the final selection takes place at Fresnoy in the beginning of July. Each year’s class is made up of 24 students who receive a budget of 8,400 Euros each to produce their project. The first year is almost entirely devoted to producing pieces using the languages and techniques of the cinema and photography. Pieces produced during the second year must use innovative or emerging digital technology. The use of sound and musical production occurs during both years, as does the crossing of disciplines. The experimental processes can lead to partnerships with laboratories or specialized companies, for the development of specific applications. Specific “research/production” mechanisms have been set up with the Ircam (Institute for acoustic and musical research and coordination), laboratories, and in the framework of international Franco-Belgian programs (Interreg IV).
Machine of possibilities
While the Fresnoy-Studio’s principal goal is training and production, it also functions as an art center dedicated to contemporary creation. There was, for example, the memorable Dans la nuit exhibit in December 2008 that celebrated the center’s 10th anniversary. Each year, the Panorama exhibit presents, under the auspices of a guest curator, pieces produced by students and guest teachers. This year’s curator for Panorama 12 is Fabrice Bousteau (assistant curator: Pascale Pronnier, stagecraft: Jacky Lautem). Fabrice Bousteau explains the event’s sub-title, Soft Machine: The Fresnoy Soft Machine is a machine of possibilities, it feeds off of a multicultural student body, it feeds into them, and they shape, distort, and transform each other. It feeds off and gets moving with fluids it receives from the permanent faculty, which is a model of adaptation, in addition to possessing the energy necessary to guide students that are so different from each other. It sometimes snaps to life with a start, when guest artist teachers (Luc Moullet, Joana Hadji-Thomas and Khalil Joreige, Hans Op de Beeck, Ulf Langheinrich, Jean-François Peyret, Scanner / Robin Rimbaud), from geographical and intellectual horizons as different as those of their students, pour their own oil on. Because the Fresnoy is less a school of thought than a school of action.
Working Maieutically
We spoke to Eric Prigent, digital creation curriculum director, about the pieces exposed by guest teachers and students this year: first of all, I’d like to underscore guest artist-teachers’ commitment, their involvement, and their desire to share with the students of the Fresnoy. The dialogue between guest artist-professors and young artists, which is what made Alain Fleisher’s project so unique when he founded the Fresnoy, is based on this unique idea: generosity.
Christian Rizzo, who had been a teacher in 2008-2009, and has come back for the 2010-2011 season, explains what is special about his role: provide students with the guidance necessary for the project to be born… But what is primordial for me, is the notion of giving back. It’s like working maieutically, in a certain way. And, simultaneously, helping other projects to emerge, leads to the emergence of my own. I’m forced to impose the same level of performance upon myself that I demand of the young artists; it forces me to remain vigilant in the work I do.
Stereoscopic installation
But let’s get back to the artist-professors invited to participate in this year’s second year promotion: Robin Rimbaud (Scanner), Ulf Langheinrich and Jean-Francois Peyret. Ulf Langheinrich created Movement X this year, which is a stereoscopic installation coproduced by Fresnoy and Epidemic. Robin Rimbaud produced an installation called Falling Forward: a film that smashes to pieces a certain notion of time and presence. As they jump into the void, human silhouettes are irresistibly attracted by gravity towards an inevitable end. In the pictures, they’re floating, stoic and free, carried forth by superior forces. Resigned to their inexorable end, accomplished in forgetfulness, their disappearance, what are these people thinking about, what are they remembering at that precise second? They live through an eternity in a few seconds, seeming to have forgotten what’s around them. I want this film to freeze those condensed instants of contemplation.
Scenes of cracking ice, glasses breaking, pictures tearing apart and flying dust are captured at 1000 images per second, while a lonely feminine silhouette is quickly crossing the screen. The sound track maintains the tension, creating a welcoming, sensual, almost melancholic presence. Robin created the music, or sound creation, for the films and installations of several students he worked with this year. Also, at a party one night, he produced a creation using images taken by the students. By the end, he had been directly involved in twelve projects. Not only as professor, but also as creator. Generosity…
New Navigations
Jean-Francois Peyret, artistic director of Compagnie tf2, director, and university professor, launched Le Traite des formes in 2002, with Alain Prochiantz: a study/daydream on life-forms and artificiality, bodies and machines. In 2010, he continued this study at the Fresnoy, where he created, with the help of several partners, including the cecn-Mons (center for contemporary digital writing) or the EMPAC, re:Walden, Materiau Thoreau, an installation whose material made up of the work of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or life in the woods. First published in 1864, it talks about the two years, two months and two days that Thoreau had spent in a forest cabin. The next step for this installation should be the theatre stage.
Let’s wager, however, that in the digital age, our brains, yes, for better or for worse, being used to new navigations, are ready, that is ready from a sensorial perspective, for the adventure: to walk through our cabin, which is simultaneously a music box, a picture box, and a word mill. All machines are machines of/for memory. Ours randomly combines (all machines are really combination machines) real and recombined memories, real unreal memory committed together. Venial crime. Actors, an architect, a musician, a videographer, a technical wizard and a director (the official racoon of the affair) went to live in Walden, just as Thoreau had gone to live on the edge of Walden. One experience for another. They built this cabin that you could visit on foot, as homage to the author, the same one, of the Art of Walking.
Interactive Documentary
We were also taken by Eric Prigent and Michele Vibert (Fresnoy communication) to meet some students who were currently working on their projects. Hee Won Lee, from Korea, showed us through her workshop, where she is assembling 108 music boxes. The work, which involves extreme precision, half way between high tech and low tech, will produce a literary and musical machine. Each music box generates letters (each letter corresponds to one note) that recompose the testimonials of abandoned Korean children. Atsonubu Kohira, from Japan, was in the midst of building a cabin above which he installed a powerful vacuum. There’s only room in the installation for one visitor at a time. The idea is to vacuum the dust and particles off of each visitor, transforming them into sound, so that each spectator discovers his own music. Jacques Loeuille explained to us how he directed his interactive documentary about an American highway. Not Route 66, which runs across the United States from east to west, but the “nuclear trans-American” which he followed from north to south, collecting testimony from farmers and veterans. Enlightening. The next exhibit, this fall, from October 9th to December 31st, called Belge avant tout (Belgian above all), will be curated by Dominique Paini and Pascale Pronnier. It will be devoted to contemporary art in Belgium.
ANNE-CÉCILE WORMS
Published in the Digitalarti Mag #3.
Digitalarti Mag, the international digital art and innovation magazine.
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