Digitalarti Mag #12 (English) by Digitalarti

#12 The International Digital Art Magazine Artists - Festivals - Innovation and more

www.digitalarti.com

GRÉGORY CHATONSKY IMAGE AND FLUX… d i g i t a l a r t i # 12 January-February-March 2013 - 6 € / 8 $ US

FRED FOREST ARTS & SCIENCES ROBERT HENKE SOUND ART PETER WEIBEL ANNE-MARIE DUGUET DIGITAL ARTWORK & PUBLIC SPACE

JANUARY/FEBRUARY/MARCH 2013

Telefossiles, Gregory Chatonsky, solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tapei (2013). © R.R.

FEATURES 03 EDITORIAL 04 DIGITALARTI.COM info, blogs and links

05 ART-LAB residences, workshops and events

06 NEW YORK exhibitions, galleries and initiatives

07 CHRONICLES Frank Rose, Jacqueline Caux…

08 FRED FOREST media man n.1 (exhibition/retrospective)

12 DIGITAL ARTWORK & PUBLIC SPACE Lab[au], Antoine Schmitt, Samuel Bianchini, Scenocosme…

16 GREGORY CHATONSKY image and flux (interview)

20 ARTS & SCIENCES L'Hexagone, Scène Nationale de Meylan

22 ROBERT HENKE Fragiles Territories (installation)

26 PETER WEIBEL directeur du ZKM (interview)

28 ANNE-MARIE DUGUET Anarchive in video…

30 SOUND ART at ZKM (Karlsruhe), MAC (Lyon) and Centquatre (Paris)

#12 EDITORIAL

HAPPY CREATIVE NEW YEAR This year, Digitalarti takes great pleasure in continuing to promote contemporary media arts. Over the course of 2012, our pages have presented artists such as Olga Kisseleva, Edwin Van Der Heide, Robert Stadler & Mathieu Lehanneur, 1024 Architecture, Samuel Bianchini, Adelin Schweitzer, Don Foresta, Christian Zanési & Jérôme Soudan, Trafik, Shu Lea Cheang, Dan Roosegaarde, Random International, in addition to festival reports and special features on connected bodies, creative cities, telepresence, and as always, probing articles on design and innovation. We have also developed our production activity in the artlab, as well as our distribution network with both private and public partners in France: Water Light Graffiti, created by Antonin Fourneau and coproduced by Digitalarti, will be exhibited from February 9 to 16 in the new space dedicated to media arts in Cergy; Stéphane Perraud’s Flux will illuminate the rose window of Gare de l’Est until April 2013; Scenocosme’s Lumifolia is installed in Aéroports de Paris’ new Roissy terminal… If digital art occupies the Internet, galleries, museums (sometimes), it’s also present in public space (see article page 12). A special mention goes out to New York artists and organizations such as Eyebeam who braved Hurricane Sandy and remain active despite the devastating intrusion of reality in the virtual worlds they nurture. We would particularly like to pay tribute to the pioneers in this issue: the essential, unclassifiable French artist Fred Forest, but also AnneMarie Duguet and Peter Weibel for their long-lasting commitment to artists. Featured in our next issue: Jeffrey Shaw and Norbert Hillaire… We wish you all, artists, producers, distributors, engineers, hackers, and of course, dear readers, a happy year ahead, rich in esthetic shocks and artistic discoveries. ANNE-CÉCILE WORMS

32 AGENDA exhibitions, festivals…

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DIGITALARTI NEWS

DIGITALARTI.COM Find all of this information, blogs, links and other news on our site Hacktivism: interview of Benjamin Gaulon, aka Recyclism. The digital art channel

We have interviewed Benjamin Gaulon, hacktivist artist, on the occasion of two exhibitions programming his artworks: 2,4 GHz in Mal au Pixel festival at La Gaîté Lyrique & Kindle Glitcher in Print Error, publishing at the digital age, exhibition in the virtual space of Jeu de Paume, both in Paris. More here

< http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/digitalarti_mag/hacktivism_interview_of_benjamin_gaulon_aka_recyclism >

Focus

FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE LA IMAGEN

PARALLEL STUDIOS

The International Image Festival, conducted by the Department of Visual Design of Universidad de Caldas in Manizales (Colombia), is a meeting and debate space on issues related to electronic arts, digital audiovisual creation, digital and electro-acoustic sound, and growing links between art, design, science and technology. The International Image Festival, held since 1997, is regarded as an event of international importance, due to the fact that it is the only one in Latin America that encourages the construction of debate environments in the areas of digital creation by integrating art, design, science and technology through personal encounters, scientific and specialized seminars, national and international invitations, discussion forums, concerts, workshops, exhibitions and webcasts, among other activities.

Parallel Studios produces the CURRENTS new media exhibitions. This year it's CURRENTS 2012: Santa Fe International New Media Festival. Parallel Studios was founded in 2002 to provide venues where established and unknown artists can work together to present state of the art video and new media work to the public. Access to exhibitions is always free. Parallel Studios brings regional, national and international new media arts to New Mexico through the currents exhibitions, internships, workshops, docent tours and educational programs that reach out to the schools and to communities. Parallel Studios seeks to foster international artistic exchange by inviting New Media artists from around the world to present work at the annual CURRENTS exhibitions and by establishing international connections in order to present the work of U.S artists abroad.

< www.digitalarti.com/blog/festival_internacional_de_la_image_ >

< www.digitalarti.com/blog/parallel_studios >

Agenda CURRENTS 2013: The Santa Fe International New Media Festival CURRENTS 2013, the 4th Annual Santa Fe International New Media Festival will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, from June 14th to June 30th, 2013. CURRENTS’ curators look for the unique ways artists use technology as a tool for expression and communication, and ways that scientists, programmers and developers are integrating the arts and aesthetics into their explorations and projects. Read more < http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/parallel_studios/ currents_2013_the_santa_fe_international_new_media_festival>

Artistes A Goldfish Orchestra, Quintetto Quintetto is an installation based on the study of casual movement of objects or living creatures used as input for the production of sounds. The basic concept is to reveal what we call "invisible concerts" of everyday life. Read more < http://www.digitalarti.com/video/ quintetto_a_goldfish_orchestra >

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Björn Schülke's kinetic sculptures German artist Björn Schülke is currently exhbiting his kinetic sculptures at the Bitforms Gallery (New York). This exhibition, Luftraum (airspace), gathers drawings and the debut of three interactive works. It sounds like a perfect opportunity to have a look at what Björn Schülke has been working on since 1998. Read more < http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/digitalarti_mag/ bj_rn_sch_lkes_kinetic_sculptures>

Festivals, Art Centers

Second Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN laureate is Bill Fontana The Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN awards international digital artists residency at CERN and Ars Electronica, as well as 10,000 Euros prize money. Bill Fontana, the famous sound artist has been awarded. It's the first time that Sound Art category appears. Read more <

http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/digitalarti_mag/second_prix_ars_el ectronica_collidecern_laureate_is_bill_fontana >

Eyebeam needs your help to repair Sandy's damage.

Innovation

Eyebeam needs your help to fund the salvage of their archives and equipment after Sandy's damage. Some times ago, Sandy Hurricane hit the east coast of North America, causing serious damage in Haïti and New York, up to the American boarder with Canada. Read more < http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/digitalarti_mag/eyebeam_needs_your_help_to_repair_sandys_damage >

Cube in Cube, a projection by G8 Labs Two cubes are spinning around the same axis, the big one looks empty and transparent, and contains the little one, which seems full and white. However, only the big one is full, the small one is nothing but a 3D-like projection adapted to the big one's rotation and to the location of the head of the viewer (detected with a Kinect). Read more < http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/digitalarti_mag/ cube_in_cube_a_projection_by_g8_labs >

DIGITALARTI ARTLAB

Latest news from Artlab Opened since 2011, the Artlab is a center for research, development and prototyping and aims at gathering artists and technicians in a creative and collaborative way. Digitalarti's Artlab is a place with a multidisciplinary activity, where technology meets artistic creation. The Artlab welcomes artists and technicians as artists in residency, free-lancers, visitors, or volunteers (learning through helping)… The projects selection is based on several criteria: artistic and creative quality, technical knowledge, potential impact on the artist/technician career, the project's input to the Artlab's development, ability of the project and its creator to join the life of the Artlab. Jason Cook, an artist/technician, manages the Artlab, along with a network of artists and technicians. All about Artlab here < www.digitalarti.com/artlab-fr >

Portrait

Projet

Workshop

Création

TOM WERSINGER: CODE ART ENTERS THE ARTLAB

LULU WHITE

ARTLAB FOR ECV

HELLO ROBOT

created by Jason Cook in Digitalarti's Artlab. The work is one in a series titled object avatar; investigations in body applied sensors to manipulate sculptural objects remotely. As robotics and electronics are commonly conceived as masculine in their form and function, the touch sensitive element responds to this cliché by employing cabaret paraphernalia to test the androgynous and seductive capacities of the machine.Read more

Introduction to Digital Arts and first steps with Arduino: this was the program of a workshop, lead by Jason Cook in the Artlab, ECV students attended on the 8th of October. Read more

The Artlab is a welcoming place: a mechanical hand wearing an orange glove waves hello or goodbye at the people entering or leaving the Artlab.

Since it was launched one year ago, the Artlab has been focusing on concrete projects, using elements like water, or objects like fur and feathers texture. The new artist-in-residence, Tom Wersinger, is following a software approach turned towards an open and social web. Read more < http://www.digitalarti.com/

fr/blog/artlab/tom_wersinger_lart_du_ code_entre_au_artlab >

< http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/

artlab/workshop_in_the_artlab_for_ ecv_students >

< http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/

artlab/lulu_white_created_by_jason_cook _in_the_digitalarti_artlab >

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IN SITU NEW YORK

Months after hurricane Sandy whipped the U.S. East Coast, the most devastated areas of New York City are gradually coming back to life. If the December 20th resurrection of Eyebeam, which lost $150,000 of technological equipment in the flood, is symbolic of the resilience of Chelsea galleries, New York’s art community is already back in the game. © PHOTO KEN SHULER

physical space. Once inside, visitors may feel like extras in a film by Peter Greenaway: a baroque and multisensory scene (symmetrical fields of swings, a giant fluttering white curtain, “talking” brown paper bags, gramophone); live animals (caged messenger pigeons); performance (readers, writer, singer); all symbolic of an esthetic ecosystem in a dreamlike décor. The game is to animate the great curtain by playing on the swings as in a theater of marionnettes, while listening to utterances by the readers, which are wirelessly transmitted to the paper bags from behind the pigeons. The surreal experience becomes almost mystical.

Chris Klapper & Patrick Gallagher, Symphony in D Minor. Coincidentally, a couple of Brooklyn artists, Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher, designed and constructed a visual, musical and interactive installation that simulates the poetic phenomenon of a thunderstorm in Philadelphia’s Skybox Gallery. In the form of four daunting cylinders suspended from the ceiling, their Symphony in D Minor[1] responds to visitors’ nudges with images of turbulent clouds and a symphony that is sometimes tempestuous, sometimes tranquil, but never the same. Thunderstorms, by their very nature, are ominous and magnificent, says Chris. With Symphony we wanted to convey this power through the use of volume, mass and motion. While some people may approach the installation with a degree of hesitation due to its massive scale, they are quickly drawn into its playfulness. Another formidable installation, this time on the scale of an armory, Ann Hamilton’s The Event of a Thread[2] fully occupies the main exhibition hall of the Park Avenue Armory, which has always commissioned projects worthy of its imposing, historical

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On a more intimate — but just as immersive — scale, Aaron Taylor Kuffner’s Gamelatron Jalan Jiwo[3] attempts to convey the spiritual side of Gamelan, Indonesia’s traditional percussion music, by inhabiting the main space of the Clocktower Gallery, directly under the resident bell. With its authentic vibraphones, drums, chimes, bells and bronze gongs spread throughout the white room, the kinetic spectacle is as moving as an acoustic concert… except that the drummers are robotic mallets playing a digital score. Also on exhibit in the Clocktower is a triptych video-game arcade signed Babycastles, New York’s own DIY game collective, strategically set in a small room transformed into a retro pizza parlour by Slice Harvester (a.k.a. Colin Hagendorf), an artist known for his pizza-tasting fanzines, and decorated by multi-talented punk rocker Yusuke Okada. The in-situ installation resulting from this collaboration is Babyharvester[4], or the latest incarnation of a singular vision of the new arcade, where independent games are exhibited and played in a social, often DIY, setting. On the menu of harvested indie games: Peacemaker; Harpooned; I Was In The War. After the winter release of Wreck-It Ralph, the 3D-animated movie with 8-bit nostal-

(1) < http://symphonyindminor.com > (2) < www.armoryonpark.org/programs_events/detail/ann_hamilton > (3) < http://artonair.org/exhibition/the-gamelatron-jalan-jiwo > (4) < http://artonair.org/residency/babyharvester > (5) < www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/11/29/videogames-14-in-the-collection-for-starters > (6) < www.makerbot.com/retail-store >

Barack Obama vs MakerBot.

WINTER GAMEPLAY

gia, MoMA[5] has made a timely announcement that it has acquired 14 classic video games. This seed selection (Pac-Man, Tetris, Myst, The Sims, Dwarf Fortress…) is part of the museum’s Architecture and Design collection and will be exhibited in its galleries in March 2013. Such an initiative marks a considerable step forward, not only for institutional recognition of video games (not to mention media arts) as artworks in their own right, but also for their professional and systematic conservation. Finally, like a green light at the intersection of art and commerce, the democratization of three-dimensional modelization has materialized on Mulberry Street between East Houston and Bleecker. The pioneer manufacturer of 3D desktop printers MakerBot[6] opened its first shop here in NoLiTa in September 2012, showing off colorful objects printed with its new and improved Replicator 2 ubiquitously displayed in action, $5 “gumball machines”, and the surprise revelation of the boutique’s official opening on November 20: the 3D Photo Booth. Thanks to this high-tech twist on the classic funfair attraction, anyone can come in and have their head scanned for 5 dollars, then choose the size of a plastic model to print (the smallest measures a few centimeters high and costs 20 dollars). Of course, 3D technology itself is nothing new. But its increasingly direct, easy, popular and ultimately playful access is what brings us that much closer to creating our own real-world wonderland. CHERISE FONG

REVIEWS BOOKS/DVDS

THE ART OF IMMERSION

liminally by a few otakus, the new studio gods are scattering artifacts in the real world, sending text messages or staging special events in order to validate parallel stories relayed by dedicated websites, true/false Facebook profiles, etc. Better yet, using all these available elements, consumer-actors are invited to design their own advertising of this raw cultural “product” and to promote it through their own networks. The “spectacle” is complete… Debord is rolling circles in his grave… Marketing 2.0 protocol, in summary: Some geeks decode hidden messages and a few concrete hints in improbable places; their aptly named “followers”, believing themselves to be ahead of the trend, serve as portals for the general public by massively validating the uncertainties of this “alternate reality”… Whether it’s a blockbuster movie or a video game, we’re now confronted with a new way of storytelling, in accordance with new narrative possibilities offered by multimedia, free of linear and vertical constraints, in favor of stories that solicit a transversal and participative approach: it’s the age of mix and deep media. These are no longer stories to see or read, but to live… as we await total immersion in a virtual environment, modeled after the Star Trek holodeck, which the game industry is already working on. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is developing a project by the gentle name of CHAOS (Combat Hunter Action and Observation Simulation)… It’s not science-fiction. It simply confirms that the futur beckons, even as we are still inventing it…

Multiple media, fragmented audiences, serial advertising, media crossover, ubiquitous hypertext, creative immersion… In just a decade, the Internet has made us reconsider the process of creating and distributing fictional narratives. Frank Rose, a contributing editor at Wired, analyzes this “rhizomatic” culture. Basic premise: entertainment, in whatever form (book, music, film, TV series, video game, Web series, etc), is no longer limited to a single dimension, but now branches out into several media. Premise number 2: Nothing can be created without social media. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook should be considered as discrete media, at the same level as print media, radio, television, websites, etc. Premise number 3: It is no longer a question of readers or viewers. Consumers have become actors, and their participation is the best measure of their addiction… The story and the characters belong as much to them as to the writers. Premise number 4: This Copernican revolution relies on viral communication, which borrows from cleverness and role-playing games. The phenomena of novelizing and merchandizing (from pinball machines to blockbuster action figures) is now outdated by the “force of persuasion” of communication strategies based on social media, Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion which largely spill over into the real world. (W.W. Norton & Company). So, after offering a few cabalistic signs that were picked up almost sub- < books.wwnorton.com >

THE MECHANICS OF TIME In hindsight, it’s hard to imagine the stigma attached to electronic music, and particularly to techno at its beginnings, by the apologists of socalled “erudite” music. Beyond the generation gap that amplified this trench war, it took the authority and open-mindedness of a few rare shooting stars to build bridges between repetitive, experi-

mental music and the mechanical beats of Detroit. In France, of course, it was Daniel Caux who incarnated this approach. The analysis of this musicologist, essayist and radio man who died in 2008 is celebrated by the musicians he valorized—La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Richie Hawtin...—with a trans-historic perspective through a film directed by his companion, featuring unpublished pieces and vintage archives.

The Colours of the Prism, the Mechanics of Time: From John Cage to Techno, through minimalism and post-modernism, a film by Jacqueline Caux. La Huit (96 + 40 mn, DVD multizone, French / English). < www.lahuit.com >

generative art can hardly be reduced to a series of obscure equations disguised as the “primary motor”… It is first and foremost a quesAmong the many procedures, techniques and tion of attitude, under the keyword “random”. So, generative art devices used in media art, algorithmic procame before computers. Mathematics and robotics were merely the grams introduce a particular dimension. means by which artists extended their intention, their perception, They create the illusion that the work has a their interpretation, their emotions… life of its own and increase its interactive Pierre Berger & Alain Lioret, potential to the point that the artifact in L’art génératif : jouer à Dieu… un droit ? un devoir ? question seems to escape its creator… (L'Harmattan / coll. Histoires et idées des arts). And the artist dreams of playing God… < www.harmattan.fr > This is what is suggested by Pierre Berger < www.artgeneratif.com > and Alain Lioret’s essay L’art génératif : jouer à Dieu… un droit ? un devoir ? Nevertheless,

GENERATIVE ART

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MEDIA ART FRED FOREST

FRED FOREST

FROM VIDEO ART TO NET ART 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.

the representative of the opposition to the communist regime. To summarize, I would say that my artistic activity has developed around criticism, crossing all the media that I have appropriated over time. I act at the heart of the media and/or urban fabric, conducting a thorough examination of the communication systems, both visible and invisible, that condition cultural, political and financial powers in our societies.

You are presented as both an artist "and" a theorist. Which is your preferred “status”? Born in the pre-television era (in 1933 in Mouaskar, Algeria), Fred Forest has experimented both on his own and as a university professor (after presenting his Ph.D thesis as a happening) with the many facets of sociological art and communication esthetics. This exceptional journey has led him to view the current art world with an uncompromising eye, while affirming his singular status among the “professionals of the profession”. His “multimedia” experience has also helped him, again and again, to renew himself, to seek out other forms of artistic expression, other esthetic performances. After the United States and Brazil, and thanks to Centre des Arts d’Enghien, France has finally decided to dedicate a retrospective to this media man par excellence.

For people who may be unfamiliar with your work, how would you summarize your field of artistic activity? I am a media artist who made his first famous artwork in this field as early as 1995[1], but I prefer to describe myself more accurately as a transmedia com-

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munication artist. My work (which began more than half a century ago…) has pioneered media such as participative communication in the outskirts of Paris (1965), video (1967), press inserts (1972), telephone (1972), national radio (1972), national TV (1975), Minitel (1982), slow scan (1987), LED electronic newspaper (1986), cable (1987), fax (1987), radio airwaves (1987), Internet (1989), Second Life (1998). Please excuse this fastidious enumeration, but it is necessary to educate French institutions, which are unfortunately always lagging behind, and teach them what they should have known long ago… I also claim the identity of communication artist, among others, for the events that I have initiated, for example: my actions during the 12th São Paulo Biennial, Mètre carré artistique, Madame Soleil’s exhibition at Musée Galliera, the world premiere sale of Parcelle/Réseau in Drouot, my own wedding with the artist Sophie Lavaud on the Internet, or my candidacy for president of National Bulgarian TV as

To be honest, they are both the same to me. First, I claim the full status of an innovating artist, then I accept the fact that I am an academic who initiated two artistic movements—sociological art and communication esthetics—to which I have continued to contributed both in theory and practice (sociological art with Jean-Paul Thénot and Hervé Fischer from 1974 to 1981, communication esthetics with Professor Mario Costa from 1982 till now[2].

You were already the subject of a retrospective at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia in 2007. What is the difference with this event? May I gently remind you that I also had a previous retrospective in 2005 at Paço das Artes in São Paulo, Brazil. In a way, I accumulate retrospectives that are sequential but not similar (laughs). The first in São Paulo, under the wing of Daniela Bousso, with Priscila Arantes as curator, had all the necessary space but unfortunately lacked the financial resources to translate the full spectrum of my work—and a plethora of work it is. Then in 2007, the Slought Foundation and senior curator Osvaldo Romberg

had the necessary finances, but not the space. The originality of my retrospective at Centre des Arts d’Enghien in January 2013 is that I myself am the curator! The budget is sufficient but modest in this time of crisis. In terms available space, it’s well below capacity for translating in detail an artistic activity that has spanned half a century, representing more than a hundred materialized works, and more than 600 numbers, registered with Ina’s national heritage, constituting half-inch tapes, VHS, U-matics and audio cassettes. And since the walls can’t magically expand in a concrete architecture, I think I made the right decision. Meanwhile, I await my next… retrospective, which is already currently being negotiated between two American academics with lots of degrees and the enlightened representative (the only one I know) of a large French institution. If it works out, this will be my fourth retrospective (laughs). But as retrospectives are usually a prerogative of people who are already dead, I still have some time ahead of me to not give up prematurely and collect retrospectives like others collect butterflies. Of course, I would have to slow down on my cur-

rent productions, if I still want to find a balance between available budget and space to fill (more laughs).

How did you select the works? How is the show structured? By periods? By media? By intention? This is where we inevitably get to the more annoying questions. ;-) Or more precisely, that which goes against the grain of the experts. Between choosing a traditionally chronological approach, or one based on intentions by media or themes, I decided to make the—yet again transgressive—choice to not choose! I don’t have anything against structured education, and my former students from École des Beaux Arts and the university will confirm that. However, given the limitations that are inherent to the space available, I am offering visitors a creative path through the exhibition. This means placing a few symbolic milestones in my process here and there throughout the space. For example, M2 artistique in the form of enlarged press inserts, Vidéo Troisième âge with an installation of photos and video documents, or Le blanc envahit la ville in analogue, or even Avis de recherche de Julia Margaret Cameron,

Fred Forest, TheTraders Ball, installation/ simultaneous event in situ and su Second Life. LabGalley, NewYork, 2010.

the social media safari hunt that uses daily classified ads in Var Matin, radio, TV channels FR3 and Antenne 2, where for four months, the whole city searches for an imaginary character, identifying and communicating with him through postal mail and Minitel. Twenty screens will punctuate my exhibition in order to present these various installations.

With hindsight, how do you judge your old works? What problems do they bring over time? My old works are very current. The issues I raise are the same as the ones I develop in more recent pieces—a critical questioning of art and society, as well as the future of human behavior within this new environment. For me, ethics has always had priority over esthetics in my work. So much for background. Otherwise, over time, the basic concepts established by artists of the 1970s have turned out to be the same ones that are simply “reactivated” by using certain technologies: remote presence and action, real-time, social games and role-playing, ubiquity, interactivity, exchange, contributory participation, gestures and behaviors, networking, territory, power, hybridization, coexistence of the imaginary and reality.

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open to participation by artists from around the world, without any institution, curator or censorship—in short, uprecedented.

Will there also be performances/talks during the event? Yes, on opening day there will be a simultaneous performance in Second Life and in the exhibition venue, where both online viewers and real-space visitors are invited to dance on “Wall Street”. In a way, this is to celebrate/denounce the crisis with a popular grand ball, animated by two American rappers brought together by Ferdinand Corte and a video by Robin Alamichel.

What about your fight against cultural institutions, your vision of media art in relation to the current art market?

Fred Forest, Chemin de croix, installation. Galerie Christian Depardieu, Nice, 2005.

Fred Forest, The Traders’ Ball, installation, Lab Gallery. New York, 2010.

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Yet we might have expected a renewal. I find that the younger generations, with their more prominent use of new media and programming, have made little progress in terms of new concepts. I mean concepts other than the ones that seventies artists pretty much created, such as Roy Ascott (the “shared”, “distributed” author) or Robert Adrian, among many others. It’s as if the use of new tools has somehow made the contributions numb to any expected analysis. Contributions to art, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, what else? Meanwhile, we have all too often seen technical expertise dominate our thoughts. This infatuation, not to mention this trend of technical manipulation in the context of art is completely sterile, in my opinion. It’s completely sterile as long as all that we see emerging in the art field in the next few years is scientific data, which

is often poorly digested and integrated into artistic expression, dominating and superposing it. This has generated more genre confusion than relevant enlightenment from an art standpoint. Technical manipulation can never replace thought itself, even if it sometimes results in practical invention, by little tinkering genuises who thankfully give technological arts some air of nobility. As to the trend of participative contribution, which seems to have seduced many artists today and fascinated a few ignorant intellectuals for the sole reason that it passes through social networks or the Internet, I refer them to the classics, or more precisely their elders, who for the most part prefigured the Internet, even before it existed.

Will there also be new works/installations? Oh, yes! There will be a website for criticism and contributions on the state of the media [flux-et-reflux.org], where people can share in real-time their opinions on the topic of broadcasting videos, which everyone can see today on YouTube. This biased view of media is one of my recurring themes. There will also be a kiosk where you have to take off your shoe and offer your foot to the Internet in a global ecumenical operation called Universal Foot, which invites you to take your eyes off the screens for a moment, in order to become aware of the terminal part of your body in its intrinsic nudity. All these scanned feet will circulate on the Internet at different speeds to be stored in a foot database, without any guarantee of seeing them possibly resurface one warm day, thanks to a provider in the Caribbean. Finally, this biennial is

My fight against certain institutions— representing the international art market more than French artists, who shall remain nameless—after my performances at MoMA and Centre Pompidou, is still ongoing, and more than ever headed toward victory, as imagination is, of course, on my side. Culture jamming still has some fine days ahead of it to win the fight for sure in the long term through derision, misappropriation, subverted signals or guerrilla semiotics. Whether or not media art enters the market isn’t my problem. If it does enter the market one day, it will be through radically different organizations and a mindset that is independent from the artists themselves.

What’s happening with the Webnetmuseum? It’s doing very well, thank you, although ever since it launched it has been waiting for the culture budgets necessary for it to fully develop. These budgets never came, because the two muses who weigh down its grant committees— Christine Bravache and Pascale Chassedeau—have declared once and for all that it’s not art! Well, what was thought just yesterday is thought a bit less today and will be even less thought tomorrow. But it’s not a big deal when you see who does get grants from these ladies about ten percent of the time. We’ll just have to wait for our time to come, which it will, one way or another.

Over time, what developments have you observed regarding “technological” art— artistic practices that use or reappropriate photography, video then computers, digital media, online networks, etc.? Here again, “technological” art has hardly innovated when it comes to the concept of reappropriation since the 1980s. It has merely adapted pragmatically to new forms of communication and used the great echo chamber of mass media,

MEDIA ART FRED FOREST

Fred Forest on Wall Street, preparing his event The Traders’ Ball, New York 2010.

and more recently YouTube and social networks. This applies to the Yes Men with TV, or to the students in Quebec who hacked domain names and created fake government websites during their last protests. In my opinion, the most successful form of reappropriation is the group Etoy Corporation, founded in 1994, which brings together hundreds of people communicating online almost in real-time in order to subvert commercial societies that are well versed in consumerism. Other forms of artistic activism, positioning themselves between politics and economics, refuse an art market based on financial speculation, which they consider contrary to the ethical values __advocated by the Internet, which are based on sharing and disinterested solidarity. For them, this is the only reasonable position to end our above all moral crisis and create conditions for a better society that can herald a new phase of humanity, tomorrow. This questions the current direction of art, which is tributary and increasingly dependent on technical and scientific progress, when we should be more committed to an ecology of the mind, which artists are best appointed to naturally promote.

Besides the purely technological aspect, have new media really redefined art practices? I can’t answer your question as posed,

Fred Forest: l’homme media n.1, exhibition/retrospective at Centre des Arts d’Enghien, from January 25 to March 31, 2013 because in practice, the tool used to make the art is fundamental. And from this point of view, art practice is obviously radically different between digital media and painting, for example, both physically speaking and in terms of material and light effects. On the other hand, there are many media artists, who are culturally and viscerally attached to models of great painting, or easel painting, who haven’t yet gotten their feet wet, and who, if I may say, are painting with digital technology, in response to the latest mainstream preference. Of course, we can consider that they have progressed further than those who are still painting with turpentine, but I’m not so sure that the turpentine painters will be among those who will have invented the visual and invisual models of tomorrow. But good for them… Let’s just say that new media hasn’t yet really redefined art practices, but they are close to doing so for a handful of the most enlightened media artists. And considering the time that it took for Marcel Duchamp, born on July

28, 1887, to become the emblematic artist that he is today, we have plenty of time to be patient…

Besides “semantic” variations (media art, multimedia, etc.), is there anything specific to media art in France? No, neither in France nor elsewhere, now that globalization has flattened out everything on the horizon.

What future developments do you see or wish for “media” art? I wish for dazzling developments at lightning speed that will stun and amaze us, but that won’t happen, of course, because the chemistry of time, as I mentioned above, this maturation requires a long development over two or three generations and drastic changes in our cultural, social, economical, political, environmental contexts… unless there occurs an ecology of the mind, which could arise at any moment if Apple, Google and Microsoft benevolently (?) conjugated their efforts in order to find this new, miraculous gadget that may well change everything inside our heads (laughs).

What message do you have for younger generations, who were born and raised in a digital environment? I send them the following message: Now it’s your turn. We’re happy to pass the baton, on the condition that you always look straight ahead, just as we did, without sacrificing your efforts and your creativity, to use these extraordinary tools that were born alongside you, not to show off some random technical feat but to make art, and beyond art itself, to make art that aims to change the world. That is your responsibility today, a responsibility that you must assume yourselves, under our attentive, benevolent and critical gaze. INTERVIEW BY LAURENT DIOUF [1] De Casablanca à Locarno, l’amour revu par Internet (Grand Prize of Locarno at Electronic Arts Festival, 1995) [2] cf. Art sociologique vidéo (Éditions 10/18, Paris, 1977), Manifeste de l’esthétique de la communication (Revue+ - 0, special issue n°43, Brussels, October 1985), L’ art à l’heure d’Internet (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2005), Art et Internet (Éditions Le cercle d’art, Paris, 2009)

FURTHER INFORMATION: © PHOTO R.R.

< www.cda95.fr/en/node/664 > < www.flux-et-reflux.org > < www.fredforest.org > < www.webnetmuseum.org >

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MEDIA ART STRATEGY

MEDIA ARTWORKS IN PUBLIC SPACE © PHOTO R.R.

New commissioners, 1% for art, direct commissions… Media art projects are increasingly being coupled with funding schemes that emphasize their durability in public space. But such progress should not distract us from the real problems posed by the concept of augmented sustainability. show on the Rogier Tower in Brussels a few years ago; more recently the Anti VJ collective with Omicron, their first permanent video-mapping projection on the 65-meter dome of the Wroc_aw Centenary Hall in Poland; Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s Sea Cloud, Fog Installation #07015, which has been floating around the Lille Europe train station since the opening of Lille 3000 this autumn. These projects, which are becoming increasingly common, often benefit from modes of funding and organization, in France and in Europe, that integrate or take into account the durability of media artworks in public space.

Thierry Fournier, A+, video installation @ Lille 3000 / Lille.

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That media art has its place in public space is no longer subject to debate. Its various forms of integration, from the billboards of Thierry Fournier’s project A+ to the installations of Aram Bartholl (MAP) transposed from Google Maps geolocation markers, have demonstrated that the most diverse forms of digital art can exist in real and urban space. Today, the main question is how these artworks can exist in public space in the long term. More and more artists are integrating this time-based concept into their work: UVA with their luminous arch Canopy in Toronto; the Lab[au] collective, following in the footsteps of their light

1% for art As they say, “when the building goes, everything goes”. The idea of allocating 1% of a public construction budget to the production of a work of art is therefore common sense and increasingly open to media artworks. Already used to making pieces for exhibition in public space, such as their circular installation Signal To Noise in the Toronto airport, Brussels-based digital architects collective Lab[au] has recently initiated several different projects—as well as others more to come, particularly with AZF Factory in Toulouse—specifically for the allocated 1%.

They also made a strange mosaic entitled Moza1que for La Maison Mécatronique in Annecy-le-Vieux, a 3x6-meter wall of 390 individually motorized bricks. The computer-programmed movement of the bricks and colorful light projections created both varying three-dimensional geometric sequences and a light show that pulsed on and off along with the moving elements of the wall. Another ambitious project, Siloscope, should see the light in Vitry-sur-Seine. It’s a 24-meter-high architectural structure of LEDs, assuming the role of a lighthouse or doors to the city. As part of urban renewal projects led by the local government, respectively concerning La Maison Mécatronique in Annecy and Quai Jules Guesde in Vitry, these artworks were designed for the people and therefore made to last. Such is the case for Antoine Schmitt’s Bosuil Lights Quartet: Music for City Windows made in the context of a project to renovate the Belgian neighborhood of Bosuil, with similar financing. It was commissioned by the district of Deurne, a suburb of Anvers, for a long-term artwork, says Schmitt. This project was a big inspiration for City Lights Orchestra [shown in December at the Ososphère festival in Strasbourg]. These two projects constitute an open visual symphony for the windows of the city, accessible to all on the Web and its devices (computers, smartphones), a visual score that self-replicates indefinitely from an initial strand of DNA, as Schmitt likes to describe it. In Bosuil, the installation will animate four artificial windows placed on the four tallest buildings of the district, which will pulsate differently but in unison, like a musical quartet. In Belgium, this grant—which is not called 1% for art—seems less fixed than in France. I don’t even think that it’s mandatory to allocate a percentage of the budget for an artwork. Here it’s a choice by the city and the people through a representative committee, says Schmitt. However, its impact in terms of durability is also significant. The artwork is durable, and the city agrees to maintain it for 15 years renewable, Schmitt continues. First, we’ll sign a maintenance contract with the provider, who will install it. Of course, this involves certain considerations: the simplest, most robust materials possible, accessibility, etc. But aside from slightly more complex maintenance procedures, totally manageable through traditional contracts, there is no qualitative difference between a media artwork and a traditional artwork in terms of durability.

New Commissioners

While there may not necessarily be a qualitative difference in time, media artworks involve specific problems: cost, of course (especially its technological components), but also its design. Its production requires a formal application process and even a dialogue between the person who commissions the work and the artist, which can be long and complicated, especially

À Distance, interactive installation by Samuel Bianchini, for La Maison du geste et de l'image, Paris 2012-2015, as part of the action of New Patrons of La Fondation de France (www.nouveauxcommanditaires.eu). With the support of La Maison du Geste et de l'Image (MGI) in Paris, Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambrésis University, Atelier Arts-Sciences (CEA Grenoble and Hexagone Scène Nationale of Meylan) and Dispothèque Médiation association. Production: Mari Linnman, 3-CA, mediator certified by the Fondation de France for the New Patrons action.

when the client is not a public institution or a collective, but an individual. Intended to encourage direct commissions of artworks—and not just media artworks—from an artist by a person, the New Commissioners program introduces the mediation of a certified professional, who largely facilitates a constructive exchange over time. But this process also has its consequences on the durability of the resulting work. Samuel Bianchini’s piece A Distances, which was effectively produced through this program, occupies La Maison du Geste et de l’Image (MGI) in Paris. It’s a black monolith installed in the main window that lights up whenever someone passes by. As long as people are at a distance, it displays an image, that of a portrait seen from behind, but as the passerby approaches, she replaces the representation, which progressively becomes light. As the mediator of the project, Mari Linnman—and her dedicated organization 3-CA—is one of eight individual and organizational mediators certified by Fondation de France to accompany the program (250 study phases have taken place since it was introduced in 1995). The New Commissioners program allows a citizen, without any selection criteria, to take the reins and initiate the commission of an artwork that appeals to general interest in relation to social issues, land development, Linnman explains. For A Distances, the MGI team came to see us. We worked together on drafting specifications that allowed us to lay the foundation of the project, after a fairly long production stage. During these few months, we speak very little of art, we talk more about the need we might have for the artwork. Basi-

cally, we identify a problem. With MGI, the problem to identify was: How can we address others? How can we make MGI more visible? It isn’t until afterward that the artist is chosen. I was familiar with Samuel Bianchini’s work, of course, his way of building pieces that also related gesture and image. It was obvious to me that he was the most relevant choice. I introduced them and drafted an artist’s study contract. This is mainly where the infrastructure of Fondation de France comes in. The project’s specifications determine whether or not Fondation de France will invest in the study. This is very important, because we still don’t know if the final project will see the light. This is a heavy responsibility for an individual to bear. It was the first time that Samuel Bianchini had worked within such a program, but he was rather pleased with the experience. It involves a particular process, because you don’t develop the piece alone, he admits. The positive aspect is that beyond the commission itself is the need.

Aram Bartholl, Map, public artwork, Tapei 2010.

> digitalarti #12 - 13

Stéfane Perraud, Flux, monumental installation, in Paris Gare de l'Est train station. Technician : Laurent Brun.

Scenocosme (Grégory Lasserre & Anaïs met den Ancxt), Phonofolia, permanent installation. Intermunicipal House – Music and dance school, in Albertville, France.

The art project has a true utility, in terms of politics, communication, even design (…). The work has a form of utility without necessarily being converted into a useful work. Nonetheless, the project took quite a while to develop. There was a long period of immersion. I had to learn to know the place, its activity, its specific audience. The idea was that the creative process should be more important than the result, so it was quite long. What’s more, I tried to push the project toward research that involved developing a technology, but this didn’t work out for economic reasons. New Commissioners projects are always very long anyway. Most take about two or three years; A Distances took four years. Finally, the installation was contracted for three years renewable, but for all involved in the project, the prospect of its duration depends first and foremost on budgetary concerns, especially concerning maintenance. It’s difficult to defend pieces that would endure without taking the time to consider or renegotiate their maintenance, says Linnman. Bianchini believes that we should always plan a complete maintenance budget, because considering the durability of a project also means considering its guaranteed economic and technological viability. It’s complicated, because our budgets are tight, and up to now we’ve been backing the entire project up front. (…) Even the artists aren’t always aware of this problem.

Direct commissions Considering the crucial budgetary issue and costs of technology or maintenance, not to mention mediation, directly commissioning works from artists is an important option when aiming for durability. Here, an organization such as Digitalarti often acts as the project’s instigator and artistic coproducer, as was the case for the latest Parisian installations: Scenocosme’s Lumifolia at RoissyCharles de Gaulle airport and Stéfane Perraud’s Flux at Gare de l’Est. As a direct commission in response to a tender offer by Aéroports de Paris to be installed at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle, Lumifolia follows the project Phonofolia, a permanent work financed by the 1% for art at Maison de l'intercommunalité, school of music and dance in Albertville since October 2012. Lumifolia is an interactive sound garden, offering a space for leisurely walks, encounters and sensory experiences, incorporating a supplementary concept of luminosity. As in many of Scenocosme’s works, sound is created through the interaction between people present and the foliage of the plants. The plant makes a sound when the visitor approaches, and an even more vivid sound if the visitor touches a leaf. The intensity of this interaction is then transcribed into colored notes, as the four trees of the installation are connected to four “sun” lamps in a staged space… The piece opened on December 15, for a period of two years, and is located in Terminal 2C of Roissy airport,

between the border control and baggage claim areas, thus introducing a bit of “life” in an otherwise bland transit zone. We use plants as natural and living sensors, which are sensitive to various energy flows, Grégory Lasserre explains. By interpreting this sensitivity through various interactions, we call attention to the fact that our environment is made of living, reactive things. Each part of the plant (leaves or stem) is reactive. When a physical person touches it, this variation in light becomes stronger, warmer and more intense. And when several people caress the plant together, its luminous intensity is all the more amplified. Working inside an airport terminal presents an additional challenge. Making a piece within the protected area of an airport is more complicated, says Lasserre. You have to respect very strict administrative and security regulations. Each element must be verified and validated by various organizations according to protocol. The logistical support of Julie Miguirditchian and the Digitalarti team was crucial to the feasibility of this project. But the artist is overly worried about the inevitable conditions of degradation and technical maintenance. These issues also come up when our works are exhibited in museums for long periods, sometimes for more than six months. We are extremely meticulous and rigorous about the material that we make, test and use. We also always plan systems of remote technical assistance and maintenance. These days it’s easy to control computers on the other side of the world through the Internet.

UVA (UnitedVisualArtists), Canopy, Toronto.

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MEDIA ART STRATEGY

Stéfane Perraud’s project Flux, which will transcend the rosette of Gare de l’Est for four months, was a direct commission (without tender offers). Flux is on exhibit from December 17 through March 23, with a possible renewal for a longer period. The installation interprets the flow of travelers (100,000 per day) to create a fluctuating illumination on the rosette of the train station facing Boulevard de Strasbourg. Its prime location makes it visible both day and night, made up of LEDs attached to a magnetized bar that is directly in contact with the inside metal structure of the window. The light show plays hour by hour as the travelers arrive. It is triggered not by sensors, not by physical interaction, but by a database simulating little dots of light, drawing a flower and its petals, representing a traveler coming in. The dots vary according to the schedule (off hours, rush hour, etc): warm and blue colors correspond to low traffic, white to high traffic. As a result, the RGB-coded system reveals different scenes of varying luminosity and colors (Christmas, New Year’s Day, St. Valentine’s Day, etc). Despite the project’s technical constraints— such as its rigorously controlled installation,

given that the rosette is classified as a historical monument—its exhibition in a hightraffic public space met Perraud’s desire to reconsider the relationship between the user-viewer and the urban environment. I’m very interested in data related to human activity, he says. For this light installation at Gare de l’Est, I was attracted to the intense traffic flow of the travelers. By showing them a mapped interpretation of these flows, I’m trying to relate the passengers to each other, to make them collectively aware of their movement and lend a poetic aspect to the map with a very simple symbol: one spot of light equals one man, one woman. Beyond the artwork’s potential renewal, Perraud has already anticipated the issue of durability. I often use programmed lights so that I can more or less manage the lifetime of a sculpture, he reveals. An LED isn’t like an ordinary lightbulb; its average lifespan is 10 years. Here it’s directly welded to a group of components, which doesn’t make maintenance or renewal any easier, especially when each one of my projects is site-specific and often handmade. I design them with a specific program that “preserves” them as long as possible, but not for eternity! As such, and without going as far as eternity, the sustainability of media artworks in pub-

lic space cannot be reduced to a mere question of maintenance. Also to consider are their relevance, in relation to the rapid obsolescence of their technological components, but also their own artistic development. The main difficulty with durability is related to maintenance, but also to the dimension of works, which can vary, Bianchini says of his piece A Distances. My works often have the advantage of evolving, and the commissioners and I integrated this concept into the project. So I’ll probably do more workshops to change the images that react to the public. LAURENT CATALA

O (Omicron), permanent installation by Romain Tardy & Thomas Vaquié / AntiVJ.

Lab[au], Signal to noise, sound installation, Toronto.

digitalarti #12 - 15

PROFILE GRÉGORY CHATONSKY

GRÉGORY CHATONSKY

IMAGE AND FLOW… Whether it’s videos or online pieces, small applications or sound installations, the artworks of Grégory Chatonsky are committed to revealing what we don’t see, or what we no longer see, to capture the traces and dig out the rhizomes, all the while being anchored in reality, in urban and human geography… Image, still or animated, and flow ("technological, corporal or physical") are the "primary guiding threads" of this work, "even if this thread is turbulently spinning…"

To start with, can you tell us about the pieces you presented this December for Ososphère ("Notre mémoire, Les villes au loin, À l’image du texte")? Thierry Danet invited me to participate in Ososphère. I had presented an installation there about 10 years ago, so we were getting back in touch. Thierry knows my work very well, I believe that he understands the different themes of my production as a coherent whole. I went to Strasbourg and discovered this factory that had been abandoned overnight. It’s a surprising venue, strangely inhabited, like many derelict places. Thierry and I decided to show pieces about disappearance and memory in order to form a narrative that would match the tone of the space. Notre mémoire is an abandoned hard drive that rattles off sounds, which I use to make visual queries in Google. As such, the incident becomes the source of another function through formal translation. Les villes au loin is a city generated from feelings, and À l’image du texte is a text by Beckett, where each word is also translated into images on the Internet, so that the book becomes a contingent visual series. But these language experiments represent just as many possible areas of meaning for the viewer.

And what about "Das Ding II", which follows the Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg and is also online?

Capture, Museum of Contemporary Art, Montréal - Digital overproduction (2010).

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The Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg was rather formal, but some good ideas must have come out of it… I wasn’t there, Laura Romero recorded some fragments of the talk and sound atmospheres and very precisely localized on a map each one of these sounds. Then I modelized the space in 3D and spatialized each sound in its original location. Now you can move around the space, through various sounds and reconstitute little by little what is between them all. This is part of a larger research that I have been doing for several years with projects such as Revenances (2000) and Interstices (2006) on interac-

tive and spatialized fiction—fiction that is based not on a temporal narrative but on a spatial reconstitution. I believe that there is a link between this way of moving around and the democratic promise of a public place, with its conflicts and friendships, meetings and separations.

Can you talk about "Somewhere", which you made for the “virtual” exhibition "La vanité du monde", organized by SPAMM (Super Art Modern Movement) / Arte Creative? Somewhere (2009) is one of my everyday projects—the kind I feel like doing in the morning and finish the same evening. I like the lightness and the independence, to be able to do everything from A to Z in my own home studio and then distribute it on the Internet without waiting for an institutional decision. It’s a site that reappropriates Google Maps by picking a random location. You can end up anywhere on the globe. Then, for a few minutes, you move around in this place that usually you’re not familiar with. This randomness is not insignificant, because Google is systematically mapping out the globe on a grid, whether in Maps or StreetView. I did another project on this with film (Vertigo@home, 2006). Google is an ontological entreprise for sharing between the globe and the world.

Your exhibition "Telofossiles" will be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, in February. What circumstances led to this event? What will the installations be like? I was invited to Taipei last year by Shuling Cheng for an exhibition on light, and I fell under the charm of the Taiwanese people

and the country. I’m regularly invited to Asia, by Paul Devautour to his incredible Xi Yi Tang school in Shanghai, or by Samson Sylvain to the Franco-Japanese Institute. But Taipei crosses all these regions and influences. What’s more, it’s very open to technological arts, with the Digital Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was able to organize a solo show for me in one year that occupies half of their big building. Anyone who knows national museums knows that this is an exploit, and solo exhibitions for “digital” artists are still rare in these venues. I must admit that it was made possible by the tenacity of Shuling Cheng and Sylvie Parent, the two curators of this exhibition, as well as the will of the museum director and his entire team. Telofossiles is a show that collects various projects of mine about the destruction of the world since 2001. So there are about 15 digital and analogue installations. What interests me about this theme is less the apocalyptic side than the esthetic and sensitive aspect of destruction, the way that an object wavers between realism and abstraction, between function and incident, between totality and fragments, between relation and solitude. The show concludes with a monumental environment made in collaboration with Dominique Sirois and a soundscape composed by Christophe Charles. It’s about positioning yourself after the destruction, when all this, this civilization, these machines, we will have all disappeared. It’s about doing away with the romanticism that always portrays human drama

Telofossiles, solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, from February 2 to April 14, 2013. www.mocataipei.org.tw/blog

in order to face things as they are. There will be nothing left but the surface of a deserted and mute Earth, Earth in our absence. If a conscience discovers this Earth, if it digs into the soil, it will find many buried objects that it will not know what to do with. It can observe them, handle them like precious things devoid of any instrumental function. Could this be what a work of art is? Time covering up our footprints? The disappearance of human lives? This speculation places us in our own absence. I think about this autonomous esthetic a lot, without a subject, in inordinate time frames where we immerse ourselves in anticipation of our own death. We will see this immense deserted Earth, technological fossils, affects recorded on the Internet. The space closes with a question: the visitor puts on an EEG headset. If she concentrates, a heavy metal door moves forward and hits the wall of the white cube. She must then relax so that the door moves back and is able to hit the wall again, which is marked by the concentration of the previous visitors. The headset forces people to adopt a certain way of thinking by alternating attention and inattentiveness. The door stubbornly hits the wall of the exhibition.

In general, your work suggests that you prefer simple, straightforward applications— little calculators ("Au moment de ma mort") and/or random generators ("Cette absence"), a video projector… It depends on each project. Some are complex, like the interactive and generative fictions or the rock group Capture; others

> digitalarti #12 - 17

Transcription, networked interactive installation (2013).

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are more simple. But simple in what sense? Technically? I’ll admit that I’m not very sensitive to this question, because I refuse to side with technological innovation and application. What’s important to me is the ambiguous and paradoxal nature of the pieces; it’s this speculative complexity that interests me. You can make enormous installations with lots of sensors and stuff blinking all over that entertains the public, but one minute later you’re ready to move on, you’ve done it all, because there wasn’t anything to do in the first place. What’s more, by using technology to show off, you participate in a society based on domination. A big part of media art follows this logic of sociocultural animation. Au moment de ma mort is indeed very simple, almost dumb. It’s a clock that counts time from the moment I was born. This time is my time. We share the same time: a physiological time for me, a linguistic time for the clock. But at the moment of my death, all that’s left will be this digital time that keeps counting and will no longer be the contemporaneity of my life, but the monument of my birth. We sometimes celebrate the birth of famous people, like Arthur Rimbaud’s 158th birthday, as if they were eternal. In this sense, my death will be an event for a computer program, the same way that the passing of Opalka changed his paintings. In Cette absence, a program captures an image from your webcam at a random moment and e-mails it back to you at an equally random moment. So you receive yourself while being a stranger to yourself. Maybe you weren’t even in front of your computer. Then you will see your apartment strangely inhabited by the

machine, like the house in Lost Highway.

Sound is also prevalent in your interactive installations in terms of ambience, resonance, etc. How do you define the sound dimension of a piece? I have a hard time separating sound from the other elements. Most often it goes together as a whole. Sometimes, like in Notre mémoire, sound is an operational element of the piece, as it is translated. Sometimes the music industry is questioned, like in Capture (2009), which involves a rock group that is so productive that nobody can (wants to?) listen to it, neither the audience nor the alleged authors, including myself. I have a lot of respect for sound, which is why I regularly work with musicians, like on the network fiction Sur Terre (2005), where the soundtrack involved Fennesz, Scanner, Atau Tanaka, Pita and many others[1]. I also collaborate frequently with Olivier Alary. Of course, there’s something strange that happens between images, sound and text, which is difficult to express through language...

Ever since the very first photographs were retouched on Amiga in the late 1980s, images (photo, video) have often been the centerpiece of your works… Images are indeed the foundation of my work. Very concretely, I became an artist because as a child I couldn’t stop drawing, it was an insatiable passion. I was lucky to have parents who took this passion seriously and sent me to drawing classes at a young age and took me on weekly visits to the Louvre. So my passion never began with technology. That came later, as a way

into images when I got the chance to work at Canal+ on one of the first Paint Box programs in France in 1986. I still find images absolutely fascinating and mysterious, the power of images, these things that shouldn’t take place and that produce a place.

Images reappearing on Google, generated on Web pages… Net art is sometimes hard to explain. What’s your definition? Defining an art form is a problem in general, especially when the nature of artistic production is to challenge definitions. We could define Net art through Greenberg’s perspective of referencing the medium: Net art is what can only exist on the Internet and through the Internet, feeding on the network and becoming the network. Beyond this modernist self-referencial figure, I think that for my generation, the Internet is a world, whether you’re tech savvy or not. The Internet changed our access to the world, and that’s why it affected contemporary art as a whole rather than a particular sector. It transformed our way of working, accessing other artists, organizing exhibitions, writing articles, etc. What’s paradoxal is that the victory of the Internet—and an increasingly wired society—signs the death warrant of Net art, which loses its specificity. No doubt this is why Net art is now more and more nostalgic of itself and repeats obsolete forms such as animated GIFs, HTML forms, etc. This vintage nostalgia is taking over society with increasingly shorter cycles. The 2000 revival is already in motion; pretty soon we’ll be nostalgic about ourselves in our own present.

PROFILE GRÉGORY CHATONSKY Laocoon, moulage (2011). The main difference is the collective involvement of the artists. You can’t expect an administrative power to be something it’s not, especially when you leave it to itself.

Besides your artistic activities, you’re also a teacher. What do you learn from this confrontation with students who have grown up in a digital world? I don’t distinguish teaching from my artistic activities. It’s not a confrontation with the students, but rather an equal exchange, because I don’t know any more than they do. I try to listen to them, to help them technically and conceptually in their projects, to increase their power to act. Simply making yourself available for someone’s else’s project is a joy. I’m moved by these exchanges, because they force me to rethink some of my artist’s reflexes at the root. It’s touching to see artworks being made, hesitant and fragile, sometimes on the verge of collapse or a miracle. I don’t think that I could produce as much if I didn’t teach.

FURTHER INFORMATION: < http://chatonsky.net >

In conclusion, what are your thoughts, in general and with hindsight, on the development of technology (computing, IT, Internet, etc.) and its impact on art?

There is a moment, there are places where life becomes impersonal, where it’s not about your factual life consisting of a series of happy or sad events, but of a totally contingent life. This is the life that interests me and that I try to touch upon in my work. I don’t know if the term autofiction is appropriate; it’s more the opposite, something like hetero-realism: speaking of this man as I might speak of any man (or woman). It’s often a case of disposession or anonymity. In My spaces, childhood memories that were never photographed are illustrated by aereal views from Google Maps. In Ma vie est une fiction interactive II, for 30 days I sent every choice I encountered (turning left or right on the street) to an exhibition venue (Oboro in Montreal), and I let the audience decide for me. So for one month, my life was like a video game where I was hitting my head against the wall, because not only did someone have to be there, they had to decide to make a choice. An impossible life to live.

You made several artworks in collaboration (with Reynald Drouhin, Jean-Paul Civeyrac, Jean-Pierre Balpe…). What “advantages” and limits, if any, did you find in this method of working? I am both very solitary, in the sense that I can make pieces on my own, and very solidary, because I love working with others.

It’s quite simply a story of friendship. Very early, when I was doing art in high school, I worked on projects with my friends. It was a great way to express this friendship, to say that we shared something important and that we could forget our egos and personal interests to make something concrete. No doubt it was also because I came from an underground scene where we made music bands, fanzines, concerts, etc. I like teamwork when several people, for different reasons, strive toward a common goal. It’s certainly related to what I was saying about existence: something impersonal at the heart of the most intimate.

You divide your time between France and Canada (Quebec). Is there a notable difference in institutional support for digital arts and their place in the contemporary art circuit? In general, the situation of digital arts (assuming that this is the appropriate term) is more fluid in Quebec. There are lots of infrastructures for support, both in production and distribution, such as SAT, Elektra, Oboro and many others. Often these structures were created by artists themselves, who continue to manage them. The classic institutions are open, they approach digital art as art. Period. Otherwise, at the national and provincial levels, the evaluation rules for attributing grants are much more explicit, and artists are on the committees that make the decisions. It’s a very pleasant biotope, which France could learn from in order to relax the relatively heavy atmosphere here.

There is a conscious impact, when art questions technique as technique, but there is also an unconscious impact, because everyone, even the most technophobic, is constantly surfing the Internet, writing texts in Word (or OpenOffice), and perhaps they even enjoy it. Technology certainly configures a new relationship between the globe and the world, but hasn’t this always been the case? But when the impact is too conscious, it can become naïve and literal, as when artists adopt the latest innovations just because they’re available, following tech trends. We must offset ourselves better, from the inside, offset ourselves from the flows. INTERVIEW BY LAURENT DIOUF [1] The soundtrack to this installation is published in France by the label Ytterbium under the title Soundtrack For Variable Fiction

Das Ding II, website (2012).

You also do what could be called virtual autofiction ("My spaces, My life is an interactive fiction, Au moment de ma mort")…

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INNOVATION ARTS & SCIENCES

ART AND SCIENCE IN HARMONY By connecting artists and researchers through concrete projects, Atelier Arts-Sciences in Grenoble is part of a long-term plan in which promising new experiments, such as those currently being developed around new forms of writing, are sketching out new technological, artistic and civilian perspectives. Antoine Conjard, director of Hexagone – Scène Nationale de Meylan, and the initiator of Atelier Arts-Sciences, shares his thoughts. Atelier Arts-Sciences is a rather original structure. How long has it existed, and what is its mission, its strategic vision?

Michele Tadini & Angelo Guiga, La Terza Luce (price A.R.T.S. 2011).

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Atelier Arts-Sciences was founded in 2007, as the result of an agreement between CEA and Théâtre de l’Hexagone. There were also other partners, such as CCSTI (Centre de Culture Scientifique, Industrielle et Technique) de Grenoble. The idea is to offer artists the time and money necessary to develop a common object in collaboration with scientists and technologists. This involves a whole process of appropriation, exchange and evaluating each person’s expectations in order to build a truly viable project.

Therefore the time required for each project varies widely. It can take the form of seminars or a residency of three or four days, which allows each party to further pursue and refine their research. We’re not about long-term residencies. However, some projects require more adaptability, especially those that develop their own technology, which adds to the difficulty. This was the case for one of our first collaborations, with Annabelle Bonnéry, who was working with motion sensors on various parts of the body. We noticed that the signal was being processed, and the movement was being transcribed, with a half-second delay. This offset was a real problem in refining the project’s sensitive and poetic dimension. So the CEA engineers went back to their lab to develop a new exchange protocol. They managed to reduce the delay to 5 milliseconds, which was imperceptible to the human eye. Currently, [talented beatboxer] Ezra is also working on the project Bionic Orchestra 2.0, which requires exchanges and constant back-and-forths, and in this case a glove that allows him to directly control the modulation of light and sound on stage.

Recently he came back to the set for a week to do electronic processing tests. Also in progress are light studies by the composer Michele Tadini, with Gille Le Blevennec and Angelo Guiga from CEA. The objective is to compose light as if you were composing music.

So that’s what you’re doing in terms of tool development, but you also support other types of collaborations? Yes, we have another angle of work focused more on how new media is changing the world; it’s a more anthropological approach. We’re developing the program Nouvelles Connaissances, Nouvelles Écritures (New Knowledge, New Writing). For now, it’s still empirical in scale, but it will grow along with other projects currently in progress, such as one with the Québécois playwright Daniel Danis. There’s also Les Ateliers du Spectacle (Daniel Chouquet, Balthazar Daninos, Clémence Gandillot, Léo Larroche) and their project Le t de n-1, presented in Arcueil, in Anis Gras, on January 18. We accompany them in their writing protocol, which aims to show the inner workings of a mathematician’s brain. Their process is both scientific and poetic, like visual haikus, poetic objects that last from five to ten minutes.

The budget must have a pretty big influence on the production of the projects. How do you subsidize the artists whose projects you support? Of course, we make sure that the artists are paid, but the financing varies according to the project. The technological aspect is always very important and plays a big part in the negotiations. CEA provides part of the financing, but we can also look for more, for example, from FEDER (Fonds Européen de Développement Régional). Thanks to the workshop’s growing recognition, we now qualify for financing for research institutes, such as those of ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche). It’s important to stress that this stage of research is crucial to the project’s development, so it must be financed independently of the purely creative, artistic stage. For this stage we try to find more cultural financing and subsidies.

Does this collaboration between artists and researchers always go well? Is this stage of mutual immersion in the other’s world really essential? This concept of immersion is almost systematic. Often, the artists have prerequisites and imagine things about the

scientific world, and the scientists also have their prejudices. So it’s always necessary to go through this stage of interrelationship. And if they have negative prejudices, it can be a form of paralyzing admiration: artists who don’t think they’re up to par; scientists who think they’re limited and consider themselves to be mere technicians. Atelier Arts-Sciences’ concept of a shared melting pot is therefore very important, and its success depends on effective mediation. There are moments of exaltation but also of doubt. Right now, for example, we’re working with Yann Nguema on a large device, a 3D viewer to help us figure out how to make sculptures with LEDs. How can we be sure that our technical or technological positions are correct? That’s also part of the research.

Since the ultimate goal for both artists and researchers is also to find paid opportunities for their work, how do you follow-up on finished projects? Do you help artists to patent their technological creations, for example? Patents are a thorny issue. They’re expensive and often only accessible to highly endowed organizations with a real legal footing. So we tend to work more in open source. On the other hand, in light of current politics and the way our activity has evolved from more artisanal to creating new devices through the 12 completed projects of Atelier Arts-Sciences, a new problem arises: How to transfer these devices to the industrial field? It seems to me that in France, manufacturers and urban planners still don’t understand how vital culture has become. In an article published in Le Monde [on 04/12/12], Laure Kaltenbach, a founding member of the Avignon Forum, compares the 240,000 jobs of the automobile sector in France to the 545,000 jobs of the art sector. It’s more than double! All this is part of the current ambiguity and difficulty.

Given the projects produced by Atelier Arts-Sciences, do you believe that it’s possible to merge practices? Or that, as many have announced in the digital age, a true artist-researcher will emerge? What interests us above all is a project, an installation, that begins as a cultural act and meets the world of research. We have always stood by the principle of an artist on one side and an artist on the other side. For me, there is no art/science field. Each side must stay in its place and favor spaces for crossover. The artist doesn’t have the vocation to become a researcher, and vice-versa. However, we can always find counter-examples. Adrien M is among these. He did his thesis in computer science, and at the same time, he’s an artist. He’s come to blur the boundaries and remind us that you can’t make generalizations.

Is this transfer to the economic world the primary reason for a show such as "Experimenta", which you intend to hold once a year? Experimenta is a meeting space for artists, scientists and manufacturers. On our scale, we aren’t necessarily in control of what happens during the discussions between artists and manufacturers, but sometimes there are happy endings. We’re just glad to see that more

and more software and new media companies are coming.

Is it also your idea to share the work done in the Atelier with the public? Is this the role of "rencontres-i"? Rencontres-i is the biennial of Atelier Arts-Sciences. The next edition will take place in October 2013. We are very much interested in this contact with the public. We start off with artistic and scientific considerations, but our wish is for them to raise questions about territory, social questions. These are the big questions of our time. Right now we’re thinking about the theme for 2013, which should be: How to meet the future? It’s a truly civilian approach. In our own way, on our own scale, we are building progress. We could choose to stay in our corner with our high-end technology. But it seems more important to ask ourselves a real question, even if it’s sometimes poorly perceived: How can we share progress? This is also a real issue. INTERVIEW BY LAURENT CATALA

FURTHER INFORMATION: < www.atelier-arts-sciences.eu >

Castagna & Ravelli, Le Chromatophore — Degrés de lumière.

Anabelle Bonnéry (Cie Lanabel), Virus // Antivirus.

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INSTALLATION ROBERT HENKE

ROBERT HENKE

VANISHING LINES 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 anxietyâ&#x20AC;Ś 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? For a very long time I have been fascinated by the specific quality of laser light. Around two years ago I decided it was time to actually explore this medium. The rest happened step by step, starting from a quite small initial idea, lots of research and it did grow into the current installation, where four laser projectors draw shapes on a wall and there is also

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sound. The fascination for the medium comes from the fact that it is a very beautiful and intense light and at the same time it is really hard to control. The only way to create the shapes is by moving mirrors very fast and very precisely. This is technically very demanding, but also the limitation leads to interesting artistic decisions. You have to work with the medium and incorporate its limits in your work, which is great.

The "soundtrack" that accompanies "Fragile Territories" seems like a drone/dark ambient loop which, like the trail of laser beams, has neither beginning nor end... Could you say a few words about it? Some aspects of image and sound are very tightly synchronized, others have only loose connections or are completely independent. The most obvious connection is a

ÂŠ PHOTO JIMMY MOULD

Robert Henke @ Fabric, The Ghosts in surround Tour, Londres, March 2012. black shadow that seems to move through the space every 4.2 seconds and which is accompanied by a sound of a big blade cutting through the air. The sounds and the visual side are both created using stochastic techniques, controlled random that allows for a constant variation within certain pre-defined rules. So, it is actually the opposite of a loop, but rather

something that constantly changes. It stays within a similar field but it never really repeats and this is very important to me.

"Fragile Territories" is an immersive work, however your previous sound installations were somewhat based on interactive devices and videos... Could you also say a few words about this new field of experimentation?

For me it is an old story, I always wanted to move in this direction, it just took me some time to convince myself that I actually should start it. In many ways the work on the laser installation was very similar to how I work on music. I define structures that create sounds. And in this case those structures create visual shapes. The difference is not so big, conceptually.

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you already thinking of new projects > Arealong these lines or resorting to new technical protocols?

TO LISTEN

Monolake, Ghosts (Imbalance Computer Music, 2012)

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I am not nearly done with that medium. During my research and preparation of Fragile Territories I came along a lot of highly interesting topics which I need to explore further. I deliberately decided to leave a lot of it out of the current work, because I wanted it to be focused on a few ideas. The risk if you do something for the first time is to get so overexcited by the technical possibilities that you end up with a showcase and not with a closed work of art.

During the opening night, you performed a live-set that started very quietly, in a "microscopic-music" manner, then, the general tone evolved towards more minimal/”dubby-groovy” vibes before

Fragile Territories. Installation co-produced with La Cité, le Centre des Congrès de Nantes and the Utopiales international Sci-Fi festival, until January 6, 2013 at the Lieu Unique, in Nantes. > www.lelieuunique.com

ending with resolutely break-beat tunes as those that can be found, for instance, on your latest record "Ghosts" (cf. "Lilith", etc.)… Would you agree that this sums up Monolake's various musical approaches…? I guess so. I try to create a lot of different results using a very limited set of underlying concepts. I enjoy the fact that I can navigate from drones and soundscapes to very rhythmical music

and back within my world. I believe the more works I will do, regardless of the medium, the underlying principles will become clearer and clearer and some of the potential contradictions will resolve also for the recipients.

At the same time, the compositions you sign with your own name, robert henke, seem more ambient/experimental and incidentally very often meant for installations... what musical distinction do you establish between both signatures (monolake and robert henke)? Monolake is for a standing audience that can move to the music and it is in general more focused on rhythm. Robert Henke is the more introverted, experimental side, and as far as concerts are concerned, I prefer a seated audience that can really immerse themselves in the music.

ÂŠ PHOTO ROBERT HENKE

INSTALLATION ROBERT HENKE

Your involvement in the making of the "Ableton Live" software is well known. Could you tell us, in a few words, what new applications, effects or interfaces you wish to develop there? I am pretty much out of it. As much as I love developing software, I decided to dedicate my time to actually using it and other tools to create art. My current state is more that of an advisor. And as usual it is company politics to not talk about the future. All I can say now is that Live 9 is coming soon and that it runs nicely

and contains a few new features I really enjoy a lot.

In the spring of 2013, you will be guest artist at the prestigious standford university where you will be teaching composition / computing and performanceâ&#x20AC;Ś could you tell us more about this residency? For some reason beyond my imagination the music department thought I might be a good person to teach a class about the above mentioned topics and prepare a concert with my

students. So, this is what I am going to do in spring. And I will take the chance to learn as much from them as I hope they will learn from me. I am very excited and happy about this. I enjoy teaching and I like the challenge to do so in front of students which in a lot of fields know much more than I do. I expect quite interesting and inspiring discussions to emerge from that..

Robert Henke, Fragile Territories (installation), Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, December 2012.

FURTHER INFORMATION: < www.monolake.de >

LAURENT DIOUF PUBLISHED ON DIGITALMCD.COM / COURTESY: MCD

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DIGITAL ART INTERVIEW

PETER WEIBEL DIRECTOR OF ZENTRUM FÜR KUNST UND MEDIENTECHNOLOGIE Peter Weibel is an artist, curator and media theorist. He started by exploring the art of performance before discovering the creative potential of media and technologies. In addition, whilst running ZKM in Karlsruhe, he was the artistic director of digital art events and the new media art curator. Everyone knows your work as a theorist and curator, but it is first and foremost as an artist that you are active in the art world. I remember your installation "Possible" (1967), and its surprise effect! Wouldn't illusion, like surprise, be recurring concepts in media arts?

ZKM.

Human beings are driven by illusions. You can call it desire, drive, whatever, the fact is that illusion is the term for a space of possibility. You know something doesn’t exist, but you can make it possible. I would never say this in the platonic or classical, ontological sense, which distinguishes between reality and possibility. I say the possible is inscribed in the real (…).

Wittgenstein said, the world is what exists. Not true. The world is much more, it’s what does not exist. The room of possibility is much greater than the room of what exists. What exists is more than we can think. What we can formalize in language is less than what we can think. Normally people think you can describe something completely. Actually we can think much more than what we can describe with language. But what exists in nature is much more than what we can think. Only slowly are we approaching it. So in that sense, the world is a continuum of the possible, which is not closed. The purest impression of this idea was science. Then for a long time it was art.

Today it is not the same anymore, but for a long time, art was similar to science (…). Surprise and innovation are always part of science, also of art, as long as it follows the same idea as science. These days art is something different… It started with postmodernism, because with postmodernism citation became equal to innovation. It was not necessary like in modern art to be innovative. So postmodernism killed innovation, killed science, etc. I think that good art is always for surprise. This is what I try to do with my artwork (…). I want to surprise technically and conceptually, to open a new door, a new space, a new possibility.

You have been the Artistic Director of "Ars Electronica", the first festival dedicated to emerging art practices. Isn’t the growing success of such events, particularly in Europe, stressing the failure of museums to integrate such practices?

The greatest problem is the market. It’s my observation that the greatest, most famous media artists – like Bill Viola, Nam June Paik – are never at art auctions (…). The auction market is only for sculpture and paintings and graphics. Even when you have a famous name like Bruce Nauman, who does video installations and sculptures, his sculptures are in auctions, but not his video works. Acceptance of media art came through festivals and biennials (…). So indeed, museums act as a part of the market and exclude still media art. Biennales’ triumph is the inevitable rise of media art. Most museums are still afraid of media, they follow the logic of the market, they always show the same artists, which are market artists (…).

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Therefore we need more and more biennials and festivals. It’s the only platform where media art can be shown, unfortunately.

You are one of those who have theorized about virtuality or interactivity. Nevertheless did you not give the best definition of interactivity when you presented, in 2008, "Fiat Lux" (1967) by Yaacov Agam, at the entrance of the Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville? It’s the perfect piece to explain what is interactivity: a physical relation between the spectator and the artwork. That means the spectator is on the level of the artist. Already in Op Art and Kinetic Art the spectator had to move to set the artwork in motion or into existence. But with electricity interactivity became evident. Fiat Lux is precisely the moment of transition because artificial light has a source electricity. Electronic arts still has the word “electricity” in it. The smallest particle of electricity is the electron. The difference between media art and film, photography, is interactivity. All these old media can’t be interactive. The core of electronic art is interactivity. Today we have all these network platforms, all these social revolutions which are supported by social media. Social media are the effect of interactivity of electronic media (…).

The recent exhibition "Digital Art Works", at ZKM, revolved around the issues linked to the preservation of digital works. Is it important to preserve works that we might as well regard as ephemeral by documenting them with the appropriate media as for "in situ" installation or performance art? It’s a big problem to conserve these artworks, which are ephemeral, to conserve them to have a duration. It’s a very important project that we’re doing at ZKM.

We have our own laboratories, and many artists know this and come to ask us for help. I think this is the most crucial: how do you conserve video works, because they use old monitors, or in the works of Dan Flavin, he uses fluorescent lights (…). in video have cathode ray tubes. So I buy them now, about 400 old monitors (…). I seriously want to become the Louvre of media art in the next 500 years, that means to have the possibility to show historical works also under historical conditions.

Isn’t new media art offering the opportunity to revisit art history through reactivated practices? Indeed, media art changed the view of art and reactivated old practices. A lot of modern art, like Pop art and kinetic art, was rediscovered through the media experience. It goes back to romantic painting, landscape painting, and even back to the perspective painting of the Renaissance.

Matisse made jokes: if somebody paints a perspective, it’s like making a hole in the wall. If somebody painted a perspective, everybody wanted a flat surface to be modern. Today we have computers with all these variables so that you can make wonderful objects in space that rotate of any angle. So we rediscovered perspective (…). Bill Viola’s recreation of classical paintings opened the eyes of many people to look closer than ever at artists’ worlds, to look at it in a different way. The greatest triumph of media art is not only that it exists, but precisely the influence that media have on painting and sculpture. Today, many sculptures, many works of land art or performance art, used photography and video as their medium. So we can say that media have become the only material of sculpture and performances. So the triumph of media is the effects it has on art forms prior to itself (…).

In a society shaped by digital technologies, are the artists who use the said technologies not better equipped to provide us with readings or interpretations of the world? This is precisely my axiom. It started with Seurat, the master, the most scientific of the impressionists. He said: I want to give a picture of my time with the means of my time. When our world is created by electronic media, the artists are best suited and adapted to give a picture of the contemporary world using the means by which the contemporary world is constructed. So in 100 years, when people want to know how it was in the 20th century, or in 200 years how it was in the 21st century, the best testimonials will be media art – be it video installations, be it computer installations, whatever.

ZKM.

FURTHER INFORMATION: Peter Weibel < www.peter-weibel.at > ZKM < www.zkm.de >

INTERVIEW BY DOMINIQUE MOULON ON NOVEMBER 2ND, 2012, IN KARLSRUHE, GERMANY

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PROFILE ANNE-MARIE DUGUET

ANARCHIVE Anne-Marie Duguet may be a discreet lady, but she is a key player in the French and international new media art world. After her (forced) retirement from the university, she is now one of the primary theorists of video ("Vidéo: la mémoire au poing", Hachette - Collection l'Échappée Belle, 1981) and electronic arts (as they were called before digital media). © PHOTO R.R.

Anarchive collection, there are several exhibitions that I would like to do fairly soon, as well as two books that I have been working on for a while now. It’s already a lot—too much, no doubt.

Do you think that digital art, or new media art, receives enough support in France?

Fujiko Nakaya & Anne-Marie Duguet.

Before everyone else, she entered the digital age while following the studies, works, exhibitions and careers of countless pioneering new media artists. She was also the thinking head (along with artist JeanLouis Boissier) of the Artifice(s) festival, which from 1990 to 1996 brought Seine Saint-Denis up to speed with the future of art. All along, Duguet has ignored both geographical and professional boundaries. She has worked on every front, and for the past 13 years, she has even become a publisher, as the figurehead of the transmedia collection Anarchive. After the Spaniard Muntadas, the Frenchman Kuntzel, the Canadian Snow, the Swissman Otth, it’s the turn of Japanese artist Nakaya (who just made hjhjhj this summer, a publicly commissioned work for Lille 3000) to sign the latest "Anarchive" opus: Fog ñ∂ Brouillard. Anne-Marie Duguet talks about new media art, the "Anarchive" adventure and volume #5, which spotlights Fujika Nakaya, the magician who sculpts fog.

You’re retired from the university, but you seem just as active. Why, and what are your next challenges? “Retirement” from research means nothing to me. There are so many artworks and fields of knowledge that excite my curiosity, so many different approaches to relate to one another in order to refine what we know. Besides continuing the

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I think it gets more support in France than in other countries. There are grants, even if there are never enough, exhibition venues are opening little by little, and especially, media courses are now common in art schools and universities. Maybe soon the use of technology in artworks, to which the label of “digital art” (I really dislike this term) vaguely refers, will become familiar enough that it won’t be in a separate category, as was the case with video. There will only be projects that require specific funding, which can vary in size according to the complexity of the technology involved.

From video to artists such as Maurice Benayoun, Grégory Chatonsky and Samuel Bianchini, you have witnessed artists appropriate new media at lightning speed. How do you see this relationship between artists and technology developing? As these technologies become more familiar and more common in everyday life to a greater number of people, I believe that these relationships will mature, audiences will become more demanding, and these artworks will no longer rely solely on technical surprise and spectacle to be recognized. I am not against surprise or spectacle when they are based on ideas. The spectacle of technique can also be a critical idea. I’m thinking of Nam June Paik, that wonderful techno-idiot.

You are an exhibition curator (especially of "Artifice(s)", a pioneering new media art show in France), a theorist on the beginnings of video… and now a publisher, too? I never intended to become a publisher.

I’m a publisher by default, almost by chance, because I couldn’t find any publisher who was audacious, or shall we say oblivious, enough to accompany me on this adventure. Becoming the publisher myself was the only way to be autonomous and ensure the collection’s survival. But now I find that it’s a really interesting job; I wish I were more competent.

What was the original idea behind "Anarchive"? From the beginning, the idea was to constitute a memory of the artist’s work as a whole through multiple archival documents, and to encourage the artist to make original multimedia pieces, in particular which explored interfaces, beyond a simple database.

Did the creation of "Anarchive" reflect a state of urgency in media arts? Yes, the project began when I was teaching and writing about video and new media. I constantly faced the problem of lacking documents in order to talk about the creative process and the artwork itself. By traveling a lot, I was lucky to experience firsthand works such as installations, but how could I communicate, describe and analyze these pieces without referring to them visually? This is when I realized how much artists’ archives were lacking, photos were often of poor quality when they existed at all, preliminary sketches were partially lost, etc. I felt that we urgently needed to take advantage of the artist’s presence to translate their living memory into another type of memory. It’s still urgent, but younger artists tend to think about preserving and promoting the artwork as they are creating it. They have a website, they document their work, they save the data as they go along. This wasn’t the case, at least systematically, for many artists until the 1990s.

Five publications in 13 years… The adventure continues but seems quite labor-intensive! Not 13 years, 18 years!! We started working seriously on the project with Antoni Muntadas in January 1995. “Labor” may have a negative connation, but yes, each project is the result of a long “labor”, subject to all sorts of vicissitudes, unknowns, where we must constantly adjust various preoccupations and work schedules… And then it’s hard to know when to stop searching for archives…

How do you select the artists who are “collected” by "Anarchive"? It’s the artworks that draw me to the artist, as a whole, an attitude toward art and creativity whose memeory I believe is necessary to preserve.

The artists we invite generally work across several media, especially with electronic images, performance and installations. But above all, at the beginning there is always an experience, an intellectual “alert”, an emotion, that leads me to approach the artist for this project. The artist must also like, or at least accept, to work with a team (graphic designer, programmer, art historian…), and we must share some affinity, in order to establish trust and complicity. This is essential.

How did you choose Fujiko Nakaya, who is not known for working in new media the same way as Muntadas, Snow and Kuntzel, the previous artists involved in "Anarchive"? Most people don’t know that Fujiko Nakaya is not only a pioneer of fog sculptures but also of video in Japan. She was involved in creating the video collective, Video Hiroba, she opened the SCAN video gallery, and she has made several videos since 1971. Also, her fog sculptures produce stunning images, don’t you think? They can also be uncertain, fragile screens for projected images. They are also entirely interactive… I think that our concept of technology is often too narrow, too limited to image production, although this is changing with the development of robotics and renewed interest in cybernetic and kinetic art. Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculptures paradoxically use heavy and fairly complex technology.

How long does it take to collect all the content of an "Anarchive"? It always takes a long time, because we’re working with artists who already have a long career behind them, and therefore usually lots of archive material. We need to relocate documents that have been spread out, sometimes restore them, often complete them, digitize them, classify them… For all of this, we rely on the participation of the artists. But as they continue their own work, and the Anarchive project should not keep them away from it, the time spent collecting material also depends on their availability.

Is publishing an issue of "Anarchive" like curating a solo exhibition? In some ways, yes, but here the space is virtual, and that’s a big part of what interests me in this research. The interface design is a key element of each Anarchive—it’s about defining a space to be explored, bridges between content, possible interactions. How do we move through this memory, which modes of exploration are the most relevant to the work, to the essential principles that characterize it?

Who’s next? You’ve mentioned many names—Gerz, Hill, Viola, Fujihata, Hatoum—, all of whose work seems immense?

Is publishing the only viable medium to mediatize and preserve the work of these great artists?

Yes, there are many artists with whom we would love to do an Anarchive and who have signed an agreement in principle, some of them 15 years ago!! The next artist will be Masaki Fujihata, with whom we started doing research a long time ago. But the “next” one will really be whoever can dedicate time to this project, and for whom, very practically speaking, I can get funding!

More and more institutions, museums and libraries are looking into preserving multiple traces and documents on ephemeral arts, performances, computer programs, installations, etc. Digital publishing is one among many modes of mediatization. I think that a precise description of artworks such as installations is a way of “preserving” them.

Not so long ago, an analysis on new media artists concluded that if these artists are so poorly represented in institutions, it’s because art critics don’t review them enough and therefore private collectors don’t bother with them, etc. What do you think? It’s true that criticism plays a big part in promoting the artworks. Collectors have money, but not always the necessary training to form a personal opinion, so they turn to intermediaries. But art critics are still few, and not always very critical anyway. We need to focus on initiating collectors to the development of artworks that use advanced technology.

Can "Anarchive" make up for that? The objective of Anarchive is not to promote the works; the artists we work with don’t really need us for that. Most of them are already pretty well known. But there are, shall we say, benefits that we enjoy. For example, I’m happy that Fujiko Nakaya’s work now has a better distribution in Europe. Her Anarchive contributed a little to that. But the work of Jean Otth, the fourth title, is still under the radar and it’s a shame. No doubt we didn’t work hard enough to raise the visibility of Anarchive.

Do you consider "Anarchive" to be like a museum, or an alternative? No, it’s certainly not a museum. Memory is living, and thanks to the Internet it can be constantly updated and enriched. We are currently trying to adapt the published anarchives for the Internet. Digital Snow is already accessible online, and soon Muntadas’ first title Media Architecture Installations will be too. INTERVIEW BY JEAN-JACQUES GAY

Foggy Forest, 1992, Showa Kinen Parc, Tachikawa, Tokyo, Japon.

FURTHER INFORMATION: Fujiko Nakaya, Fog ñ∂ Brouillard (Anarchive #5, book + DVD-rom + DVD-video, September 2012) www.anarchive.net

FUJIKO NAKAYA is a great artist, but almost unknown in Europe, as her in situ artwork is seldom seen, often difficult to photograph and so experimental that it must be felt from within. A pioneer of Japanese video, this physician’s daughter studied in the United States to become a painter, traveled across Europe, then returned to New York in 1966, where she joined in experiments between artists and engineers— Bauhaus Utopias, which led to the creation of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), where scientists collaborated with Cage, Tinguely, Cunningham, Warhol… and Fujiko! Hence Nakaya’s first fog sculpture (at the Pepsi Pavilion of the 1971 World Expo in Osaka). Today, Nakaya’s adventure continues with Fog, her first monograph collecting texts, drawings, paintings, videos and films from 50 artworks, including her fog sculptures made between 1971 and 2011. Fog is an Anarchive that reinvents the intersection of art, science and technology.

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FEEDBACK SOUND ART

SOUND ART @ ZKM, MAC & 104 As far back as the early 1900’s, the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo foresaw sound as a medium by playing “noises” with the instrument he called an ‘Intonarumori’. Since then, numerous artists or sound artists have participated in what today is called Sound Art. Now art centres like ZKM in Karlsruhe, the MAC in Lyon and the Centquatre, in Paris, are echoing this artistic practice. © PHOTO R.R.

By doing this, he appropriates the accounts of ordinary people in order to glorify them in a museum. This practice of video sampling in the era of global sharing is once again a matter of relationship forms.

The synthesis of all of our fears

Douglas Henderson, Stop, 2007.

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Taking over amateur practices Are there still any differences between the video practices of amateurs and professionals when we are all potentially directors of our own TV channel on the Internet? Have they arisen through intention, popularity or because of broadcast spaces? An entire life would not suffice to watch all of the sequences that show up when the word ‘cat’ is entered on You Tube! It was by doing such research that the American artist Cory Arcangel collected amateur films documenting a few of the innumerable videos of cats stepping on piano and synthesiser keys. For anyone interested, he freely gives the name of the application that allowed him to organise the samples according to the notes of Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 11 of three pieces for piano (Drei Klavierstücke, 1909).

There is a siren for every catastrophe, industrial or natural, and children around the world who have never known war, hear the startling sound beginning deep and grave and becoming increasingly strident, most often the first Wednesday of every month, of a warning siren. Just within France there are several thousand, which we can easily imagine in the most diverse shapes and colours. It is precisely this diversity that is the focus of Tyler Adams piece entitled Sirens, dating from 2012. He has brought together sixteen entirely different sirens in the frame of a video grid. But this choreography is menacing because it precedes the horror of our imaginings. By fusing the sound of many sirens, the artist plays upon all our associated fears. And we begin to think of the sirens that sounded during WWII, those that happily remained silent during the cold war and those that ring out today in Syria, Israel or in Gaza, because there is always a siren wailing somewhere in the world. And in general, all they have for echo are the silences of those who live in peace.

Chronicle of a death foretold Christian Marclay’s gestures in the film Guitar Drag are measured. Without any great haste, he attaches a Fender Stratocaster by its neck to a Pick-Up that he then starts up. It is when its foretold destruction begins that the final solo is drawn out right to its end - an endless moan. And there is the sound along the way that is even more chaotic. The work comes to an end when the amplifier no longer has anything more to amplify. The concert ends and we inevitably

think of Pete Townshend for whom trashing his guitars on the ground to extract their final sounds became a habit, or Nam June Paik in a more gentle mode, dragging a violin behind him. Unless we think of the horror of the racist crimes that involve dragging men, for the colour of their skins, behind trucks as was the case in Texas as recently as 1998. But the violence in Christian Marclay’s film dating from 2000 is situated more in the preparation when the sentence that has been pronounced is comparable to the ceremony that precedes an execution in the corridors of a death foretold.

The plasticity of silence There is another electric guitar at the ZKM, which was silenced when the artist Douglas Henderson buried it in a block of concrete. The work Stop, dating from 2007 could be thought of as another homage to the 4’33’’ of silence that John Cage composed in 1952. No sound will ever be heard again from this guitar in the Media Museum, frozen in time like everything was in Pompei in the year 79. The Marshall amplifier to which the guitar is connected reveals only its potential. This art work in the exhibition participates in pushing the limits of sonic art as far as sculpture where sound figures only by its absence, its lack. The block of concrete preserves the work by depriving the instrument of its primary function. But is not the primary function of a museum to preserve? Beyond its obvious plasticity, Stop is a work that is open to many interpretations as it might just as well symbolise those we reduce to silence, or those who find themselves confined within four concrete walls when their ideas offend. The question of musicality is decidedly absent.

Correspondences To experience Edwin van der Heide’s sound installation, one must first be equipped with an audio headset that is linked to a photosensitive sensor as the quality of the light emitted by Sound Modulated Light varies from one bulb to another. By holding an electronic sensor in the hand, we can look for the sounds corresponding to the different light signals. What we hear is nothing other than what we see and so we are particularly attentive to the environment around us, like photographers peering through their lenses. We then look for the sounds that are hidden in the ambient light of the sensor that defines the scope of the work. At the exit, those who haven’t taken off their headset will perceive that the screen of the video work adjacent to Sound Modulated Light also emits its own audio signal. The world around us is thus filled with sound messages that are only waiting for us to hear them. Beyond the game of discovering sounds hidden in space ‘by hand’, Edwin van der Heide’s light installation incites us to better hear the world, which is too often masked by seeing.

5 6

1/ La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, Dream House, 2012. 2/ Edwin van der Heide, Sound Modulated Light 3, 2004-2007.

Kaffe Matthews, Sonic Bed, 2005.

3/ Zimoun, 416 prepared dc-motors, hemp cords, cardboard boxes 60x60x60cm, 2012. 4/ Christian Marclay, Guitar Drag, 2000. 5/ Tyler Adams, Sirens, 2012. 6/ Cory Arcangel, Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, 2009.

Our resonating bodies

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon

The artist Kaffe Matthews asks the public to take off their shoes before lying down on her Sonic Bed, which looks slightly like a coffin for three (or four) people. It is equipped with an entirely invisible sound installation that might make certain amateurs of tuning green with envy. Lying down comfortably, one must totally abandon mind and body for the experience to be complete. Bodies complete the work by resonating frequencies that are played by it. Laying on this sonic bed amounts to listening to one’s body via the sounds that pass through it, as there are sounds, frequencies that are among the lowest, that are heard from within, through our skeletons and right through our flesh. The sensorial experience of Sonic Bed can be shared by two, three or four participants even if the sound journeys one makes are resolutely personal. Once again, this exhibition, organised by Peter Weibel, the director of the ZKM, and Julia Gerlach, incite us to listen to the sounds of the world around us differently.

One must take one’s shoes off again before entering the Dream House that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon has reactivated in 2012 after initially exhibiting it in 1999. But it was at the beginning of the 1990’s that the National Fund for Contemporary Art acquired it from the Jacques Donguy Gallery, whereas La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela conceived their first sound and light installations in the 1960’s. The moderator at the entrance, bizarrely, is wearing protective headphones. Is this what he needs to prevent himself from really letting go? As for the spectators, they easily let themselves go by becoming one with the sound and light matter of the installation. There are those who move around to interact with the sound of this space, favourable to modified states of consciousness while others sit down, or lie down on the floor of this environment whose interior is uniformly painted pink. Eyes are open or closed and spirits are here and now in this experience of a moment.

At the Centquatre Lastly, at the Centquatre, there is an installation of apparent complexity whose name included the components implemented in the work: 416 prepared dc-motors, hemp cords, cardboard boxes 60x60x60cm. From the outside, the work looks like a monumental sculpture whose material, which is cardboard, betrays its fragility. From the inside, we hear a sound that is comparable to that of driving rain. And within, one strains to focus on anything as the struc-

ture is uniformly animated by micro-movements. The architectural shape that rises upward is minimalist whereas the movements are so chaotic that they manage to combine into one sound, which is practically like white noise. One could say it’s like the sound of a soothing fountain, and it is a kind of fountain the Swiss artist has installed at the Centquatre. The 416 motors when independent of one another are entirely without interest. But it is by combining them together that they make sense all together. Much like Felix Gonzales Torres blue candies. As for the kinetic aspect of Zimoun’s work, it has not escaped the notice of the Denise René Gallery who have only recently come to represent him in France. DOMINIQUE MOULON

FURTHER INFORMATION: Centquatre < www.104.fr > Christian Marclay < www.paulacoopergallery.com/artists/CM > Cory Arcangel < www.coryarcangel.com > Denise René < www.deniserene.com > Douglas Henderson < www.douglashenderson.org > Edwin van der Heide < www.evdh.net > Kaffe Matthews < www.kaffematthews.net > Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon < www.mac-lyon.com > Sonic Bed < www.musicforbodies.net > Sound Art < http://soundart.zkm.de/en > Tyler Adams < www.t-adams.com > Zimoun < www.zimoun.ch > ZKM < www.zkm.de >

digitalarti #12 - 31

EVENTS COMING SOON

(AGENDA)

>>> PRESENCIA ACTIVA Exhibition at Laboral Gijón, Spain Until February 25th < www.laboralcentrodearte.org > INTER-FACING THE ARCHIVE Exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany Until February 24th < www.zkm.de > ERREUR D’IMPRESSION Exhibition at Espace virtuel / Jeu de Paume Paris, France Until March < http://espacevirtuel.jeudepaume.org > ZIMOUN Woodworms, wood, microphone, sound system Exhibition at CentQuatre, Paris, France Until March 17th < www.104.fr > Performing Histories Exhibition at MoMA, New York, USA Until March 11st < www.moma.org >

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>>>

MARINA ZURKOW Necrocracy Exhibition in Bitforms gallery, NY, USA January 10th to February 16th < www.bitforms.com >

MOBILE FILM FESTIVAL Paris, France + Web January 16th to February 6th < http://fr.mobilefilmfestival.com >

TECHFEST Bombay, India January 3rd to 5th < www.techfest.org >

FRED FOREST L’Homme Media n°1 Exhibition at CDA Enghien-les-Bains, France January 25th to March 31st < www.cda95.fr >

PRÉSENCES ÉLECTRONIQUES Geneva, Switzerland January 11th and 12th < www.presenceselectroniques.ch >

TRANSMEDIALE & CTM Berlin, Germany January 29th to February 3th < www.transmediale.de >

DES SOURIS ET DES HOMMES #6 St Médard en Jalles, France January 15th to February 1st < www.lecarre-lescolonnes.fr >

MOIS MULTI Montreal, Canada January 31st to February 28th < www.moismulti.org >

>>>

JARDIN NUMÉRIQUE Rennes, France February 6th au 10th < www.jardinnumerique.org >

>>>

LAVAL VIRTUAL Laval, France March 20th to 24th < www.laval-virtual.org >

YEBIZO FESTIVAL Tokyo, Japan February 8th to 24th < www.yebizo.com >

VIA FESTIVAL Maubeuge, France March 12nd to 24th < www.lemanege.com >

TILT FESTIVAL Perpignan, France March 22nd to 24th < www.elmediator.org >

NODE 13 Frankfurt, Germany February 11th to 17th < http://node.vvvv.org >

FÊTE DE L’ANIMATION Lille, France March 14th to 17th < www.fete-anim.com >

SAVE FESTIVAL Moscow, Russia March 24th < http://mixtura.org/save >

ICI L’ONDE Dijon + Mâcon, France February 14th au 17th < www.whynote.com >

VIDEOFORMES Clermont-Ferrand, France March 20th to 23rd < www.videoformes-fest.com >

ELECTRON FESTIVAL Geneva, Switzerland March 28th to 31st < www.electronfestival.ch >

digitalarti #12 - 33

WHO’S Digitalarti Mag Digitalarti is published by Digital Art International. CHIEF EDITOR: Anne-Cécile Worms < acw@digitalarti.com > ASSISTANT EDITORS: Laurent Diouf < laurentdiouf@digitalarti.com > EDITOR'S COMMITTEE: Julie Miguirditchian < julie@digitalarti.com > Malo Girod de l’Ain < malo@digitalarti.com > EDITORS: Anne-Cécile Worms < acw@digitalarti.com > Cherise Fong < cf@espionne.com > Dominique Moulon < dominique.moulon@gmail.com > Jean-Jacques Gay < jjg@larevue.fr > Laurent Catala < lcatala@digitalmcd.com > Laurent Diouf < laurentdiouf@digitalarti.com > Sarah Taurinya < sarah@digitalarti.com > TRANSLATOR: Cherise Fong (French > English) < cf@espionne.com > Valérie Vivancos (English > French) < valerie.vivancos@gmail.com > MARKETING & ADVERTISING: Julie Miguirditchian < julie@digitalarti.com > COMMUNICATION: Sarah Taurinya < sarah@digitalarti.com > ORIGINAL LAYOUT: Autrement le Design, Antoine Leroux, < antoine.leroux@autrementledesign.fr > GRAPHIC DESIGNERS: Yann Lobry < ian@digitalmcd.com > ADDRESS: Digital Art International, 13 rue des Écluses Saint Martin, 75010 Paris, France. Represented by Anne-Cecile Worms, CEO, publishing editor. E-mail: info@digitalarti.com Website: www.digitalarti.com

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