For a few years now, Deniz Kurtel has been renowned for her interactive sculptures and, above all, her light installations. Based on LEDs run by computers and combined to mirrors and various materials, her creations sometimes look like metal spiders or psychedelic labyrinths.
Thanks to her interweaved and shinny works, in particular, she was honoured by the Communikey Festival of Electronic Arts in 2008. However, paradoxically, Deniz Kurtel remained in the shadow! Despite numerous st...
Between streaming video installations, sound/radio experiences and writing of sonic tales, electronic artists duo Magali Daniaux and Cédric Pigot turned Norwegian great north into a new field of exploration. A nomad adventure that relies on geostrategic, climatic and biogenetic considerations.
Capture the unspeakable
In this month of February, lost in the middle of boats frozen by the ice in the little harbour of Kirkenes, Norway, silence is reigning. Almost reigning. Microphon...
By giving new media prospects to suburbs youth, “Terres Arbitraires” (Arbitrary Grounds), the recent nstallation presented at Evry’s Theatre de l’Agora, shows social commitment of french multimedia artist Nicolas Clauss. A long-term work that follows his quest of human connection and participation, and that stresses out excesses of security along with stereotypes and stigmatization concerning marginalized urban spaces.
Memorial list
Today, the public of Evry’s Theatre de ...
You need to go up to Troy, in the North of the State of New York, to discover EMPAC, a centre for the arts dedicated to new media and live performances that opened at the end of 2008. At first glance, the design of its architecture reflects its vocation: the combination of art and science. To know more about this unique place, we interviewed Kathleen Forde, Time-Based Arts Curator.
Could you tell us when EMPAC was founded and why?
The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performin...
Four centuries separate "Richard II", the five acts play by Shakespeare from "Seul Richard", (Richard Alone) of Thierry Fournier’s stage production inspired by it.
It is well known, the great human wonders at the heart of the English playwright’s work are timeless, but the "context" in which they are re-presented makes it possible to highlight other aspects, other angles… To find an echo within the quite autistic technological modernity of certain fo...
Artist, teacher, engineer and composer, Golan Levin has been combining all of his skills to create interactive works. His creations involve the eye (“Double-Taker (snout), Opto-Isolator, Eyecode, Reface (portrait sequencer)”…), the gesture (“Interstitial Fragment Processor, Scrapple, The Manuel Input Workstation, Interactive Bar Tables”…), the voice and the ear (“Ursonography, Messa di Voce, Dialtones a telesymphony)”…) or graphic software (“Self-adherence (for writt...
Their avatars, these virtual creatures created in their image, evolve in the universes imagined by Naziha Mestaoui and Yacine Aït Kaci. We find them meandering about an uncluttered apartment, swimming languorously in a pool, modifying their architectural environment with a simple gesture. The duo of artists, Electronic Shadow, has created a space for their incarnations.
Electronic Shadow: Naziha Mestaoui and Yacine Aït Kaci Virtuality penetrates reality and this friction transpo...
On September the 11th, Joseph Nechvatal was in his parisian gallery, talking to friends, journalists and scholars about his exhibition and more generally about his work. That day is no longer the same as other days for many, and being a New Yorker it might even be more significant to him. Especially if we have a look at his works and the layers of history, signs and meaning they convey.
His exhibition in Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard, is entitled: Revisited Retinal Art: Hist...
The heart of the laptopsRus project are the performances, inside a ring: two women at a time engage in a VJ battle, projecting their visuals on huge screens around the room. Around the ring, the audience cheers for each participant, and the VJ with the loudest cheers get to stay another round in the tournament. It's a fun environment, a competition without a winner at the end.
The two nights in Madrid were a good examples of that: the first evening, there was the setting as descri...
French-born 27-year old interaction designer Mikael Metthey, harnesses his profession's very specific procedural mechanisms, to produce artworks which investigate the development and interaction between new technologies, science and design. It is an equation of relationships in which human behavior each time embodies the unpredictable and unavoidable variable, which defines each result.
Concretely, Mikael Metthey's artistic practice consists in the creation of interaction design pro...
All the kids of my generation who enjoyed the rules and games of mathematics remember the Victor Vasarely circles on the cover of their school books. Like a UFO landed in the south of France,on the top of a hill in Aix-En-Provence, the Victor Vasarely foundation has been rising since 1976, as an apparition of the future, a statement of 60's (not to say 20's) creativity... A pact between art and architecture.
Reactivated by the team of an ambitious but human sized electronic art fest...
French artist Jacques Perconte initiated in 2003 a series of digital "films" that explore the landscape, and above all its image; the series will its sixth offspring this year, "Impressions de", a reference and reverence to the Impressionists, for his aesthetic has always been—incidentally—compared by critics to their own. How could it not be?
Indeed, through a meticulous and craftsmanlike work of multiple compressions, collages and superimpositions, Jacques P...
Introduced at Berlin's February Transmediale, Coïncidence Engines, by the Quebecois [The User], with its 1240 radio alarm clocks — beyond its obvious homage to Ligeti’s metronomes — provides an interesting perspective on working in a duo. With the diversion of their materials, via the prism of new technologies and the new social relations they create, and the poetic overlapping of structure, space and sound, the aesthetic and exploratory universe of [The User] has discovered an i...
Eduardo Kac is an artist whose practices are constantly shifting and recombining. He has designed robotic and interactive pieces, as well as remote presence works, before moving on to the body, as early as 1998, and defining what he would later call Transgenic Art. But he is also the author of research publications and various forms of poetry, using holographs, digital technology, and the biosciences.
GFP K-9
Everything really started in 1998, when Eduardo Kac wrote an article pro...
Polar zones? Spatial or polluted zones? What kind of spaciousness applies to today’s extreme environments? Can art be an indicator of our ability to occupy them? For its tenth edition, the @rt Outsiders festival continued its reflection on a world where man becomes totally aware of his connection with these universes, hostile or familiar, to be discovered or protected…
New forms of transdisciplinarity Events like @rt Outsiders, reinventing in their own way new forms of transdisc...
It’s cool. It’s a multi-purpose shape. It’s a box.
"True Stories", a film by David Byrne, 1986
Universal Machine Metaphor
For a few decades already, so many among us have spent their days strangely bent over, eyes roving and fingers flickering, one hand hovering over their work table, in front of what is called a “personal” computer. Ever since com-puting machines have come to surround us on all sides, become part and parcel of our work and leisu...
"Feed", the most famous performance of the Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger, is a real success as it goes from one festival to another. A total piece of art, petrifying, which offers a perfect opportunity to penetrate into the sensorial universe of this intriguing multimedia artist.
The spectators, squeezed together and seated on chairs in the middle of the room, get progressively absorbed into the insistent electronic music around them and the images of floating bodies ...
Based in Brussels, the Transquinquennal theatre collective has been exploring the dramaturgical potential of digital technology since its inception. In En d’autres termes, a silent show performed in 2004, four characters cook and eat a meal during the whole show. They overtly manipulate family photographs from their childhoods. These intimate traces are filmed by a robot-camera, which moves about magnifying them, scanning them and gently following them with its mechanical eye. At time...
Du Zhenjun initiated his artistic practice in China before discovering the potential of new media at the Fine Arts School of Rennes at the end of the 90s. Some theoreticians and other curators, among whom Edmond Couchot, Pierre Bongiovanni and Richard Castelli, allowed him to exhibit his work in different French and then European art centers. Lately, this Chinese artist who lives in France, started to exhibit between Shanghai and Beijing his interactive video installations, revealing t...
Interactivity is one of the central issues in Samuel Bianchini’s work. His pieces have been exhibited in such places as the Paris Musée d’Art Moderne, the Karlsruhe ZKM, and during such events as the White Nights and the Rennes Biennial.
All Over
With a doctorate in Art and Art Science entitled Operating in Media Reality, defended at the Palais de Tokyo, Samuel Bianchini is involved in numerous research projects, and often works in collaboration with scientific research lab...
