Robert Henke. Photo © Jimmy Mould
This article comes from the 12th Digitalarti Mag. Read it online for free.
Strange feeling when slipping between the black curtains that block the great hall of the Lieu Unique in Nantes: a mix of curiosity, excitement, but also anxiety… This is the first time we are faced with "Fragile Territories", a tentacular installation by Robert Henke.
How did you conceive "Fragile Territories"? On which technical and conceptual basis...
Pioneer—this is the term most often used to describe Fred Forest in the playing field of media arts. Two more words form another refrain: “network” and “territory”, like the X and Y axes of his artistic activity. This practice is rooted in the last century, as he began by “trafficking” images and paper, and then progressively annexed every mode of communication, from video tapes to virtual worlds.
Born in the pre-television era (in 1933 in Mouaskar, A...
From early days, Shu Lea Cheang, the Taiwanese multimedia art pioneer, has been building interactive fictions borrowing from the major themes of our time, gender, sexuality, science fiction and media. Her mythological fictions draw on intimate as much as public matters, questioning her own story whilst inviting the spectator/visitor to participate.
What is mostly remembered from the multimedia artist Shu Lea Cheang is her famous and ultra-commented film, I.K.U. (picture above, see its wi...
Presented at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery, the exhibition Before The Rain by the creative studio rAndom International broadens our perspectives on behavioral, technological and purified human representation.
Situated at the crossroads of kinetic art and interactive installations, the seven-year-old London-based creative studio rAndom International has already dug deep into the nuances of human representation in artworks relating to movement, light, and strong yet often minimalist esthetics...
Walls of “intelligent” aluminum flowers, digital plants that light up and react to passers-by, “wired” clothing… The works of Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde convey a strange synergy between technology and humanity, with a backdrop of organic architectural poetry. Interview with the creator.
Daan, your tactile and high-tech projects initiate interesting encounters between the city, nature and people—in particular the Dune series, which you first developed in...
Geneva and Paris are now linked by a high-voltage acousmatic cable. The Présences électronique festival, created in 2005 by Christian Zanési, artistic director of Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), has been resonating in Geneva since 2010 thanks to Jérôme Soudan, an artist known as Mimetic and co-curator of the Electron festival. These two conveyors of sound ideas engage in friendly crosstalk.
How did this experience of bringing Paris and Geneva closer tog...
It would be misleading to try to describe Don Foresta’s career in so little space, as the itinerary of this American diplomat, who has become one of the major artist researchers of the international art world, is a relentless series of connections throughout the world, the arts and the sciences.
Indeed, it would be misleading to tell the story of Don, this young man who arrived in Paris in June 1971 to assume the position of cultural advisor at the American Embassy. Fortunately for us, ...
Adelin Schweitzer, an artist from Marseille, is currently collaborating with art centres such as the Zinc / Friche Belle de Mai or Seconde Nature in Aix. Since 2008, the greater part of his work has been devoted to principles of augmented reality, especially through the evolving project named A-Reality, whose upgraded version was presented only last October in Dresden.
Since his early devices, including VidéoPuncher 1.3, (presented a few years ago at the ARCO biennial of contemporary a...
With two galleries, two exhibitions and four installations, French artist-researcher Samuel Bianchini pursues his experiments with viewers at work, exploring and challenging our senses.
Bianchini surprised us in Rennes by exhibiting the result of an original collaboration with two Breton university departments. By “refurbishing” three of his interactive works at a gallery in Paris (2), the young artist is claiming his place in an art market wary of technology and interactivity. Th...
The Dutch artist and researcher Edwin van der Heide explores the combinatory fields of sound, light and spatiality. His interactive approach often places the viewer at the heart of his work to actively explore installations whose dimensions are just as voluminous as they are volumetric. Interview with the artist.
Edwin, your new piece, Sound Modulated Light 3, will be presented from March to August at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. It’s the latest in a series of works that was initiated a few ye...
Perfume digitalises its choreography and reckons the move in the time. The three Japanese musicians, in its video Perfume Trail, draw each dancer's gestures to get them concrete in 3D as curvy marks. The use of never-ending travelling cameras and the very sober clip aesthetics put the finishing touches to this successful experience. An animation made thanks to Autodesk Softimage 2012 SAP, with a depiction due to Luxology modo 601.
To dis...
Visual artist, art director of the "Studio" at the Maison des Arts et de la Culture in Créteil since 2000, curator of exhibitions included in the "VIA" and "EXIT" festivals, at the Manège in Maubeuge and the MAC, Charles Carcopino is currently working on several events. At an international level he is notably preparing a new exhibition for the OCT Land in Shanghai, sponsored by the French Embassy in China, as part of "Croisement" festival taking...
How to instil a timeless dimension, intrinsic to art, into one’s own work, and question at the same time scientific advances of one’s era? How to seduce conquistador-collectors in the North Pole, investors in China or Europe, with a critical eye on the alienation of our ways of life tied to the development of new technologies? How to teach the art and science correlation at the Sorbonne and prepare an exhibition at the far ends of Ural and Siberia?
Olga Kisseleva’s artwork...
Every year in Paris, the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie and the APCI (Agency for the Promotion of Industrial Creation - whose mission is to ensure the promotion of design as a key component of economic, social and cultural innovation, the quality of life and the respect of the environment) are gathering the most innovative design achievements in an exhibition named "L’Observeur du Design" (The Design Observer).
Some productions are being granted a label (th...
[Wat?], abbreviation of "Who Are They?, We Are Trafik, Who Are Trafik?" is the title of the latest solo exhibition by the Trafik collective(1). [Trafik] of signs, letters, paper, pictograms, typographies, pixels, fonts, colours, LED(2), the graphic design agency, set up in Lyon at the end of the 1990s, is asserting its style and circulating the light between New York, Rennes and Taipei. Responding to the rigorous constraints of traditional graphic design, its creative proposal...
I met Wayne Ashley, the Founding Artistic Director of FuturePerfect, in Montreal, at Elektra Festival, when his project was just beginning in New York. FuturePerfect now is a performance, media, visual art and technology platform. They commission, produce, and present new work, offer residencies, talks, education, and opportunities for touring. Interview.
How was FuturePerfect born? What is the philosophy of the project?
The name FuturePerfect refers to the future perfe...
Instead of the widely used "video game" term, Lynn Hugues, co-founder of TAG (Technoculture, Art and Games) and associate dean for research in the fine art department of Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, prefers "digital games", a phrase that enables her to widen her field of interpretation and creation by developing both a more experimental and global approach (technological, social, artistic…). Interview.
Coud you tell us about your background?
I h...
Within just a few years, the Incite/ duo has made a name for itself on the A/V performance scene. Initially known to an audience seeking abrasive sounds, Kera Nagel and André Aspelmeir have gradually synchronized their electronic rhythms and post-industrial flavours with silvery-white visuals splashing all over them on stage…
These images both suggest dreamlike and hyperrealistic, geometric and organic elements, which combine in a "semi-narrative" script. Their previous ...
The UVA (United Visuals Artists) collective, recently invited by La Gaîté Lyrique to adorn the building with lights on the occasion of its opening, is one of the most active art groups in the fields of digital arts, architecture and public space, also dabbing in performances linked to fashion shows, music and…environmental issues. A frenzy of projects through which we are being led by Alexandros Tsolakis, UVA’s official architect since January 2008 and the man behind some of the m...
Artist, teacher-researcher, 3D pioneer, video artist, stage designer, photographer, virtual reality artist… Maurice Benayoun needs no introduction. Refusing to be labeled, a supporter of open systems, he prefers the notion of “open art” to that of “digital” art. The use of digital tools no longer being a distinctive criteria in the art field, nowadays, the computer is the most shared item in the whole of human activities…
A double exhibition retraces his art trajectory ove...
