Niio joins the exhibitions of the ISEA2022 Barcelona 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art with a selection of artworks addressing the main themes of the symposium. The screen-based works address the notion of possibles in different ways, from the dynamics of microscopic particulate matter to the global effects of climate change, from new worlds we could inhabit to those that are fading away, and from our individual perception of the world to the realization that even machines can forget. Through generative algorithms, artificial neural networks, virtual reality environments and video editing, Frederik de Wilde, Diane Drubay, Jeppe Lange, Sabrina Ratté, Antoine Schmitt, and Snow Yunxue Fu have created fascinating narratives that speak of the possible humans and non-humans, natures and worlds, and futures and heritages, integrating the culture and the processes of artistic, scientific, and technological disciplines.
The Generative Quantum Ballets (GQB) are infinite generative visual artworks, each one staging a choreography of a crowd of pixels displaying apparently arbitrary and independent movements, but all actually programmed by the same quantum-type equation. This global underlying organization manifests itself from time to time through unexpected and fugacious alignments or groupings, which the eye barely has the time grasp, with awe and delectation. This series of artworks deals with the invisible forces at stake behind complex systems, like particles, peoples or societies.
A landscape formed by hundreds of impressionist paintings dissolve into pure color and brush strokes, constantly mutating while the voices of a man and a woman narrate the musings of a person who regained sight after fifty years and learned how to look at the world anew. The video invites a meditative contemplation in which many shapes of nature are evoked, but no single element can be identified. This experience leads to what the narrator describes as seeing “through the codes,” and observing the world in itself. The realization that our perception is just an interpretation of our environment opens up possible readings and alternative forms of construing our reality.
Seconds become years. 14 seconds to experience the metamorphosis of utopia into dystopia. 14 years to reach carbon neutrality or the point of no return. This piece plays with colour-psychology to create an immersion that draws two possible futures, both fascinating and shattering.
A short video of a deer in a forest is fed to a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). By applying custom degradation techniques, the image gradually dissolves into a monochromatic plane. A single pixel that provides a graphical representation of forgetfulness. Through an experimentation with Machine Learning, the artist creates a telling depiction of the act of forgetting, in a way that connects the biological brain and the synthetic computational brain, while evoking the fragility of memory.
FLORALIA, 2021 Sabrina Ratté Images and soundtrack composition: Sabrina Ratté Sound design and mix by: Andrea-Jane Cornell
Inspired by the writings of Donna J. Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Greg Egan, the work plunges us into a speculative future, where samples of then extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive room. Through editing and visual strategies, this archive room is sporadically transformed under the effect of interference caused by the memory emanating from the listed plants, revealing traces of a past that continues to haunt the place. Floralia is a simulation of ecosystems born from the fusion of technology and organic matter, where past and future coexist in a perpetual tension of the present.
Karst is multi-level virtual reality visual and sound experience/artwork that creates liminal spaces in between the representational and the theatrical, the limited and the multi-dimensional, and the abstract and the real. The multiple scenes in Karst reference a variety of places in our reality that are usually beyond people’s reach. It pushes the boundaries of landscape art by putting natural ecologies and human environmental interventions in dialogue through immersive VR. It also attempts to embody the concept of Plato’s cave in the medium of a virtually constructed realm, providing a contemplative environment for the visitor to wonder.
Artwork – The particle
Abstract: “The Particle” is a kinetic sculpture that experiments with color, sound, and movement. Continuous rotation, speed, and light create visual points of view, effects that define the spatial structure of the object. Given that the regulatory mechanism of the entire design is based on random decision-making, the new models naturally emerge from the previous ones. The vibration of sound, color, and visual patterns evolve into chaos or order according to the evolutionary algorithms that govern it. The structures generated in this process cannot be anticipated and evolve through continuous iterations that involve alterations to the programs and explore the changes through the interaction with the visitor and the software. The object, at the same time, is a space of sensory and kinesthetic experience, a body with its own internal resonance. The result is the creation of shapes and patterns of light in three dimensions. These shapes can stop, rotate and move faster or slower creating beautiful kinesthetic effects. The technique used is the perception of apparent movement, that is, the one obtained from the observation of sequences of still images projected successively on a movie screen or on television, or on a computer monitor. This visual effect, also called persistence of vision (POV), is the theoretical ability of the eye (or retina) to retain the last image that reaches it, causing an object to be perceived even when it is no longer there. Around the space occupied by the sculpture, a surround-sound space is perceived, which reacts and merges with movement and light, creating an immersive audiovisual experience of great beauty. The piece uses RGB LED technology controlled wirelessly from a computer. Custom software manages all information and movement in real-time by continuously sending data to the sculpture to change its state.
Biography: Alex Posada is digital creator, lecturer, and researcher in the field of interactivity and new media. He is a multidisciplinary artist working in the intersection of art, science, and technology through research and the constant development of his own tools and systems. He is also a lecturer on several MA and postgraduate courses and has led many workshops focused on art and interaction technologies in different countries. He currently directs and coordinates the activities of MID Studio in Barcelona. His works have been exhibited at Brazil Olympic Games, Phaeno Science Center, Ars Electronica, Kinetica Art Fair, Kernel Festival, Mapping Festival, LEV Festival, Sonar, and Art Rock Festival among others. The studio also develops projects for museums and cultural organizations. Also, he is a very active entrepreneur and co-founder of several startups. At the same time, he develops projects as an independent multimedia producer and collaborates with many artists and collectives.
This project has been awarded with the ISEA2022 Barcelona Grant by .Beep Collection and NewArtFoundation
Mapping Cité Mémoire in Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau
H2Emotion invites the public to see on June 14, 15 and 16 to a new version of the mapping from the renowned Cité Mémoire Montreal projection circuit, open to all the public. The whole project and production are a gift commissioned, produced and funded by the Bureau du Québec.
The Grand Tableau from Cité Mémoire will be projected onto the façade of the Sant Pau Hospital during three nights. It is a journey through the key periods in Montreal’s history and a look at more than 375 years of history.
Created by multidisciplinary artists Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon in collaboration with playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, the majestic digital work takes a poetic and playful look on the city of Montreal through images, words and music.
For this event, projections are at the following schedule:
H2Emotion convida el públic a veure el 14, 15 i 16 de juny una nova versió del mapping de Cité Mémoire Montreal obert a tot el públic. El projecte i la producció són un obsequi encarregat, produït i finançat pel Bureau du Québec.
El Grand Tableau de Cité Mémoire es projectarà a la façana de l’Hospital de Sant Pau durant tres nits. Es tracta d’un viatge pels períodes clau de la història de Montreal amb un repàs per més de 375 anys d’història.
Creat pels artistes multidisciplinaris Michel Lemieux i Victor Pilon en col·laboració amb el dramaturg Michel Marc Bouchard, la majestuosa obra digital dóna una mirada poètica i lúdica a la ciutat de Montreal a través d’imatges, paraules i música.
Abstract: There is in nature, a mysterious and complex mathematical system that repeats itself over and over again, an underlying geometric pattern in forms as disparate as clouds, mountains, trees or our own circulatory system. Its distinctive feature is self-similarity, the same configuration that is repeated at different scales, branching out infinitely. There are those who believe that it is “God’s fingerprint”, “the absolute truth of the universe”.
In Fractal Listening, any attempt at stylistic corseting is diluted in the hybridization of artistic languages. Thus, the fractal images dialogue with acoustic and electronic sounds in an interweaving of infinite kinesthetic notes. In this way, abstract figures in strident colors outline mandalas and enigmatic portals, piercing the virtual canvas with three-dimensional shapes that evoke sacred geometry. This incessant algorithmic repetition generated by pre-established codes, sometimes follows a visual choreography and other times -altered by the frequencies of live sound- it improvises an organic dance, introducing variations to the original pattern. Simultaneously, the sound dimension is embodied in layers and loops, intertwining the electronic bases of IDM, ambient and experimental with the live chords of a guitar. Intervening the work, a trumpet interprets vibrant and moving jazz melodies with harmonics that generate sensations of body and spirit, closing the virtuous circle with a sensory, immersive and enveloping atmosphere.
In 2019, Microfeel & Santiago Bartolomé began their collaborative work with the aim of furthering their respective creative pursuits. This path of experimentation materialized in different artistic proposals. In 2021 they created the live show AV Fractal Listening, the work combines digital art, electronic music and the guitar of the multimedia artist Microfeel (Sebastián Seifert) with the trumpet and processes of the musician and composer Santiago Bartolomé.
Biography:Sebastián Seifert is a multimedia artist, designer and music producer. He has lived and worked in Barcelona since 2002. His career has developed at interdisciplinary points of convergence, maintaining digital electronic poetics as the support, concept and format of his productions. He has an International Master’s Degree in Media and Interactive Systems at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and ESDI (2002) and the Design, Image and Sound Career at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). In the field of media art, he has developed net-art projects, interactive installations and multimedia performances, serving as curator of these languages at the «la Caixa» Foundation (Barcelona) from 2003 to 2011. With the audiovisual project “Microfeel ”, the artist highlights his transdisciplinary vocation, creating worlds that combine visuals and sound. He has taken his audiovisual concert to festivals like MUTEK (ES/AR/MX), SONAR, SZIGET, CTM, FILE and AMURAL, among others.
Santiago Bartolomé is a producer, curator, composer and trumpeter musician from Córdoba, Argentina. From this scaffolding he approaches his artistic explorations to build, in his own language, a sound cartography in which acoustic vibration and electronics coexist. His trumpet is the instrument to experience different atmospheres by erasing border lines, a tool that he considers essential as an agent of transformation of reality. His work, irreverent and enigmatic, is affirmed in “the search for sound” as a constant, versatile and possible future. Since 2001, he has been a member of the Córdoba Symphony Orchestra and Band (Argentina). Likewise, he is collaborating with different projects, favoring his interest in the intersection between artistic languages: Leonardo Prakash (Mexico, World Music), Eduardo Castillo (Mexico, electronic music) and with the audiovisual collective “Reality Soup” (Mexico, Augmented Reality and VR). Since 2021 he has been co-director and artistic director of the “Córdoba Music Biennial”.
ISEA2022 Main Ceremony
Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau will host the Main Ceremony of ISEA2022 Barcelona, on June 14, where the testimony will be passed to the next city that will host the Symposium, Paris.
19:00 p.m. Reception and registration of attendees- Visit to the exhibition of digital art with five works from the ISEA2022 Barcelona call and twenty pieces from the .Beep Collection.
20:00 p.m. Welcome drink
20.15 p.m. Speeches
20.30 p.m. Performance “Ventriloquist ontology”, by Afroditi Psarra
20.45 p.m. Standing Cocktail dinner
21.50 p.m Fractal Listening (audiovisual performance), by Sebastian Seifert
22.30 p.m. Mapping Cité Mémoire, by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon in collaboration with Michel Marc Bouchard,
There is in nature, a mysterious and complex mathematical system that repeats itself over and over again, an underlying geometric pattern in forms as disparate as clouds, mountains, trees or our own circulatory system. Its distinctive feature is self-similarity, the same configuration that is repeated at different scales, branching out infinitely. There are those who believe that it is “God’s fingerprint”, “the absolute truth of the universe”.
In Fractal Listening, any attempt at stylistic corseting is diluted in the hybridization of artistic languages. Thus, the fractal images dialogue with acoustic and electronic sounds in an interweaving of infinite kinesthetic notes. In this way, abstract figures in strident colors outline mandalas and enigmatic portals, piercing the virtual canvas with three-dimensional shapes that evoke sacred geometry. This incessant algorithmic repetition generated by pre-established codes, sometimes follows a visual choreography and other times -altered by the frequencies of live sound- it improvises an organic dance, introducing variations to the original pattern. Simultaneously, the sound dimension is embodied in layers and loops, intertwining the electronic bases of IDM, ambient and experimental with the live chords of a guitar. Intervening the work, a trumpet interprets vibrant and moving jazz melodies with harmonics that generate sensations of body and spirit, closing the virtuous circle with a sensory, immersive and enveloping atmosphere.
In 2019, Microfeel & Santiago Bartolomé began their collaborative work with the aim of furthering their respective creative pursuits. This path of experimentation materialized in different artistic proposals. In 2021 they created the live show AV Fractal Listening, the work combines digital art, electronic music and the guitar of the multimedia artist Microfeel (Sebastián Seifert) with the trumpet and processes of the musician and composer Santiago Bartolomé.
Ventriloquist Ontology is a media performance that explores the limits of control and points of hybridization between the human and the machine Ventriloquist Ontology is a media performance that conceptually stems out of philosophical ideas that are rooted in the realms of Posthumanism, Actor Network Theory and Object-Oriented Ontology. Inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s dystopian theatrical play The School of Ventriloquists, it encompasses the creation of a modular wearable, trained using Natural Language Processing to create its own language that manifests in the form of speech and movement actuation. It explores the idea of soft control and points of hybridization between human and machine through the relationship of a performer and a wearable entity. This soft modular entity speaks through text generated using the GPT-2 language model, trained on a dataset of texts around biopolitics, algo-governance, the surveillanced body, and queer theory. The softness aspect of its control refers to the plasticity of the interface, the malleability of its hardware connections, the suggestive nature that the GPT-2 generated text pertains to, and the indicative nature of the movement of the actuators.
Sequentially, it brings forth the soft data of the body inextricably linked to ideas of care and intimacy, as well as to the pliability of the different levels of interpretation between the human and the machine. The aspect of control is tied to the cybernetic idea of steering the body to its optimal movement through a feedback loop between machinic language, and human assimilation. It also deals with the hardness of the linear actuators and the microcontroller that manipulates them, to the domination of these mechanical components over the softness and vulnerability of the human flesh. Ultimately, the idea of ventriloquism is used to give agency to an ontological entity comprised of subtle suggestive wearable modules, human flesh and cognitive motor abilities, born-digital, able to produce novel language, but also conditioned to reproduce the biases of its algorithmic parts.
Stillfrom the Ventriloquist Ontology performance presented at the iii Workspace, The Hague.
H2Emotion invites you on June 14 to the tableau from the renowned Cité Mémoire Montréal projection circuit.
The Grand Tableau from Cité Mémoire will be projected onto the façade of the Sant Pau Hospital. It is a journey through the key periods in Montreal’s history: the Indigenous presence, French Regime, British conquest and contemporary Montreal —a look at more than 375 years of history.
Created by multidisciplinary artists Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon in collaboration with playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, the majestic digital work takes a poetic and playful look on the city of Montreal through images, words and music.
Abstract: What we do understand is that it is fundamental to existence. Thomas’s current research questions quantum and nanotechnologies that are utilised as part of his concepts of capturing reality in the act of happening. New emergent technologies and traditional materials are explored in his work in relationship to how he visually expresses an alternative comprehension of the invisible, inaudible and intangible phenomena studied in physics.
An electron is seen as being analogous to the movement of a spinning top. When a spinning top goes out of its spin cycle, it falls into chaos in the same way an electron in a quantum position is governed by its spin. The set draws from the analogy of the axis of a spinning top that creates a cloud of points that disappear and reappear based on the probability data from Professor Andrea Morello’s lab at University of New South Wales, developed by PhD students Serwan Asaad and Vincent Mourik. In Thomas’s digital artwork, a sorting algorithm developed in collaboration with artist Jan Andruszkiewicz in 2019, utilises speculative quantum data to transform a photographic image. In the artwork, data affects the materiality of photographic images of felt fibres, referencing Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space. The smooth space of felt is not woven, knitted, knotted, intertwined or laced. It is not a striated space where the woven fabric measures the boundary of the body’s movement in space. It has its own integrity; its tensile strength is born of chaos. The material becomes a second skin between the body and the world.
This fibrous character becomes reconfigured by the speculative quantum chaos data using a sorting algorithm to reposition every pixel in the photograph of felt fibres. The program when executed randomly selects one of ten images and Husimi quasi-probability distribution data a text file from 223,966 samples—transforming by rearranging in real-time the digital photographic images’ fibrous character of felt. An accretion of animated motion evolves over time as the fibrous image is sorted from its classical chaos to one born out of quantum chaos. Each sort of the data weaves a series of linear transformations of the felt fibres to reveal new patterns that correspond to a probability of meaning: chaos begetting chaos as an ongoing, entangled real-time process visualising a liminal space between worlds.
Biography: Paul Thomas is Honorary Professor at UNSW Art and Design and currently the Director of the Studio for Transdisciplinary Art Research (STAR) as well as the founder and series-chair of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference series 2010-2022. As an artist he is a pioneer of transdisciplinary art practice. His practice led research takes not only inspiration from nanoscience and quantum theory, but actually operates there. His current publication Quantum Art and Uncertainty (October 2018) is based on the concept that at the core of both art and science we find the twin forces of probability and uncertainty. Thomas’s internationally exhibited research projects have been based on working with scientist’s inquiring in specific areas of physics. The current creative practice ‘Quantum Chaos’ artworks are based on experiments done in collaboration with the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, UNSW. Publications, Quantum Art and Uncertainty (2018), Nanoart: The Immateriality of Art (2013).
Artwork / Last Breaths
Abstract: In 2021 Dement and Brown were awarded an ANAT Synapse Residency and CreateNSW grant to collaborate with Dr. Carmine Gentile and his Cardiovascular Regeneration Group, School of Bioengineering, University of Technology Sydney.
Cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction and heart failure, is the leading cause of death worldwide. Dr Gentile’s multidisciplinary team has created a novel way to 3D bioprint heart tissues using patients’ own cells to repair heart damage and regain cardiac muscle function. Cells isolated from skin or blood are used to generate stem cells and then transformed into heart cells. Using state-of-the-art facilities, Dr Gentile has developed a new way to form ‘cardiac spheroids’–clusters of cardiac cells–which contract or beat synchronously to produce patches for damaged hearts.
May 2021 artist George Schwarz died from cardiac failure and Linda recorded his last breaths. Audio values were retrieved to generate sequential images of 2D geometry. We imported these images into 3D Slicer (software normally used to create 3D models from MRI or CT scans) as if we had run an MRI scan on sound rather than a body.
We printed models first in hydrogel to discover shape, consistency, size, and then with live cardiac spheroids, on a LumenX bioprinter which uses crossbeams of light to harden light sensitive gel, printing upwards in 100 micron layers, substance emerging from liquid under violet light.
Through this project, human cardiac failure, expelled as breath and recorded as sound, is transfigured to 3D form as terra-firma for growth of human yet inhuman life.
This artwork responds to the research of the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group. Their work traverses terrains of life and death, bodies and technologies, human and inhuman, the strained edges of wounded hearts and the stretching extremities of bio-technical possibility.
Biography: Linda Dement has worked in arts computing since the late 1980s, at the intersections of bodies and technologies, code and flesh, dramas of the corporeal and programmed non-human activity. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally and locally, including at the ICA London, Ars Electronica, ISEA.
Dr Paul Brown is a scientist, writer, artist, and creative producer. For over thirty years he has integrated multi-arts practice, filmmaking and community engagement with university research and teaching – across humanities, environment, science and community development fields, specialising in projects that link arts, science, and environment.
Dr Carmine Gentile is a Senior Lecturer within the School of Biomedical Engineering UTS and leads the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group both at UTS and at the Kolling Institute/University of Sydney. He is a Senior Lecturer (Honorary) at the University of Sydney, a Sydney Medical School Foundation Fellow and Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School.
The artists would like to thank Clara Liu Chung Ming for assistance with cell cultivation and microscopy.
This project is supported by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) via its Synapse program, and the NSW Government through Create NSW; and by the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group, University of Technology Sydney.
Artwork / Liquid Views
Abstract: Narcissus’ digital mirror – Ovid’s metamorphosis as a real-time wave AI algorithm. Liquid Views simulates a pool of water that reflects the image of viewers whose physical interaction ultimately disturbs the integrity of the reflection. Liquid Views anticipates the selfie moment of Greek mythology, in which the image and the self are becoming increasingly difficult to parse. In this interactive installation, audiences participate in a digitally activated “mirror of Narcissus” experience as a monitor equipped with a touchscreen and mini camera simulates a water surface that appears to reflect the image of the viewer. By touching the screen’s surface, participants activate algorithms that generate waves and the sound of water, that distort and dissolve the viewer’s reflection.
Additional intervention increases the disturbance, and the image can only regain its calm form by the absence of contact between participant and screen. In the background, the participant’s mirrored face is displayed on a large projection, turning the “introverted” gaze into a public spectacle. Looking up, the interacting person perceives themselves from a different perspective – as if from the outside.
Wherever interactive environments and audience “talk” to each other, participants develop performative presence, and their participation contributes to a new embodied knowledge. The visitor is simply asked to take part and explore this Mixed Reality World as a “thinking space”. “Liquid views” is a pioneering work that takes up one of the central themes of media art by exploring the interface between the real and virtual world.
Photo by Stefanie Seidl
Biography: Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss are pioneers of media art and virtual reality. In 1987, they were co-founders of ART + COM in Berlin (The Billion Dollar Code). In 1996 they founded the MARS – Exploratory Media Lab (Media Arts Research Studies), and in 2005 the eCulture Factory at the Fraunhofer Research Association. Their awards include patents, the Ars Electronica Golden Nica (1992) and the SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement Award in Digital Art (2018).
Early work includes “Berlin-Cyber City” (1989), in which Fleischmann and Strauss memorialize aspects of Berlin’s history while imagining the city’s possible futures, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. A subsequent cartographically informed project “Semantic Map” (2001-04) traces neural networks, foretelling a method of data analysis now standard in artificial intelligence. In “Home of the Brain” (1989-1991), participants are introduced to virtual reality, while the iconic “Liquid Views” (1992) anticipates the selfie moment.
With support of the Center for Art and Media | ZKM
Artwork / Sightseeing
Abstract: A CCTV camera is filming a beach and we hear its voice, as if it were alive and thinking out loud. But the perfection of her intelligence has led it to doubt and burnout, and to not know what to do anymore: What is this? What should she look at? What is a suspicious behaviour? But above all, what is the point of all this? It compares itself to the click workers who feed artificial intelligences, questioning the meaning of its work with an anthropomorphism that raises its political stakes.
Sightseeing (Penser voir) was initially created by Thierry Fournier in 2018 at the invitation of Pierre Beloüin and the Acoustic Cameras project, which invites artists and composers to annex the real time streams of webcams located in different places around the world.
“With Sightseeing / Penser voir by Thierry Fournier, we quickly understand that we are not confronted with a real AI, but with an artifice, yet we fully adhere to the fiction of this awareness of an entity. Far from breaking our suspension of disbelief, the sound loop that reveals the deception, accentuates on the contrary our empathetic relationship to the AI that “goes off the rails”. It is literally in a loop on its machine condition, and thus on its condition of being (or rather of not being) in the world. While the landscape changes, it doesn’t come out of it, it can’t cope with it. Thus the sound loop is diegetized, appearing as a consequence of this state of burnout described by the artist.
Paradoxically, it is because it is highly efficient that this AI starts to doubt and to malfunction. The machine’s dysfunction thus becomes a metaphor for the dysfunction of a whole world that should be questioned. For how can one continue in such a world? “Fuck. I can’t make it,” the AI repeats tirelessly, while echoing the invisible click workers, the majority of whom are underpaid, who have contributed to shaping it by feeding it. By worrying about its usefulness, it also challenges the injunction to perform, characteristic of our society, which seems to consider man only in terms of becoming a machine. Thus, the fictional narrative deployed by Sightseeing around these issues of knowledge and doubt, performance and failure, meaning and non-sense, appears to be not only philosophical but also eminently political.”
Claire Châtelet, lecturer and researcher, University of Montpellier 3 (France), Les fictions de la machine sensible : l’œil, le faillible et la pensée [The fictions of the sensitive machine: the eye, the fallible and the thought], May 2021
Biography: Thierry Fournier is a French visual artist, researcher, author and curator, living and working in Paris area. He is an architect and composer by training (a graduate of the École nationale supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon). His practice mainly deals with the relations between human, living and technologies: installations, objects, works on internet, videos, drawings, performances… His curatorial approach transposes these issues into the collective field, exploring in particular the modes of coexistence of works.
Recent solo shows include: University of Montpellier III 2020, L’Art dans les Chapelles 2020, CAPA Aubervilliers 2018, Villa Henry Nice 2018, Musée d’art et d’histoire de Saint-Denis 2017, Lux Scène nationale de Valence 2015.
Curating: Château de Goutelas 2022, Mécènes du sud Montpellier 2020, Tokyo French Institute 2019, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris 2018, La Terrasse Nanterre, 2016, La Panacée Montpellier 2015 and 2014, Château Royal de Collioure 2014, Zinc / Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille 2013, Fort Lagarde 2012, Centre Pompidou 2011.
Recent group shows : Supplementary Elements University of Strasbourg 2022, Turbulence Marseille 2022, Feral File 2021, Mondes Possibles Merignac 2021, Chroniques Aix-en-Provence 2020, Depo Gallery Istanbul 2019, Le Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Arts, Tourgoing 2018, Valérie Delaunay gallery Paris 2018, Variation Art Fair Paris 2017 and 2018, Thessaloniki Biennale 2017, ZKM Karlsruhe, 2013 and 2017 to 2019, Saarlandisches Künstlerhaus Saarbrück, Germany 2016, Ars Santa Monica Barcelona 2016, New Cinema Festival Montréal 2015 and 2013, Renaissance and Fantastic Lille, 2015 and 2013, Tokyo and Kyoto French Institutes, 2014, etc.
Thierry Fournier is also head of the contemporary art workshop The Exercice of the Gaze at Sciences Po Paris. He was head of two research units from 2010 to 2020 : Displays at Ensad / EnsadLab (Paris) and Collection Artem at Ensa Nancy, both dedicated to the contemporary stakes and forms of contemporary art exhibitions. He was a guest artist-professor at Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains in 2017-2018.
He is also co-head and artistic director of antiAtlas Journal, a free online art-science journal dedicated to the contemporary stakes and forms of borders.
Artwork / Common Thread
Abstract:Common Thread’ presents slow, mysterious passages through thickly forested landscapes, comprised solely of silver-grey dots and lines; whilst effected sounds of those forests commingle with the distant voices of a myriad species. Set within those uncanny landscapes, indistinct 3D forms enigmatically appear and disappear, collectively evoking richly mysterious, unknowable and extraordinary complexities.
The work arose from my ongoing residency at Samford Ecological Research Facility in Queensland, Australia – a place protecting a remnant block of forest isolated within a patchwork quilt of surrounding farmed land, typifying the perilously fragmented, disconnected state of Australia’s habitats. It is a place active with scientific research of all kinds, much of which aims for better ecological futures – by seeking to predict more ‘efficient’ forms of conservation and production.
Common Thread, is based upon 3D-laser scanned ‘Point Cloud’ imagery of walks through that forest, using a technology that at first glance might appear to capture its complexity. But ‘Nature_Cultures’ cannot be reduced to dots. Almost everything becomes lost in such digital translations – ‘ultra-accurate’ representations in reality devoid of the spirit and meaning of place.
Australia: unceded lands of the oldest continuous culture on earth – a culture in which everyone has personal responsibility to everything – where everyone knows their relationship to trees, rocks, sky, people, animals, plants, water.. How little of this its recent settlers understand – about how to live well within such complexity. And so, Australia’s (stolen) lands have been routinely devastated.
My on-site research examined the cultural meanings of such conservation reserves within rapidly urbanising landscapes, asking – how might we imagine and seek to represent the very different futures we now need to develop together. How might we rebuild our conceptions of Australia’s places to be consultative, infinitely better informed, and with the capacity to profoundly connect settler culture to Country.
Biography: Keith Armstrong is an experimental artist profoundly motivated by issues of social and ecological justice. His engaged, participative practices provoke audiences to comprehend, envisage and imagine collective pathways towards sustainable futures. He has specialised for over twenty-three years in collaborative, experimental practices with emphasis upon innovative performance forms, site-specific electronic arts, networked interactive installations, alternative interfaces, art-science collaborations and socially and ecologically engaged practices.
Keith’s research asks how insights drawn from scientific and philosophical ecologies can help us to better invent and direct experimental art forms, in the understanding that art practitioners are powerful change agents, provocateurs and social catalysts. Through inventing radical research methodologies and processes he has led and created over sixty major art works and process-based projects, which have been shown extensively in Australia and globally, supported by numerous grants from the public and private sectors. He is also a part time Senior Lecturer at QUT, Brisbane, Australia.
Dataset contributed by Dr. Dmitry Bratanov, Senior Research Engineer (RPAS and Automation), Research Engineering Facility, QUT
Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau – Possibles
Modernism is a transversal movement with an international resonance kwnown for integrating all kinds of creators and trades in order to make the possibilites of working together a reality. Taking this interdisciplinary legacy and transporting it to the codes of the 21st century, digital art reflects this same spirit of transversality by uniting artists, scientists and technologists.
Combining these two concepts, from June 9 to 30, the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau will host an exhibition of digital art with five works from the ISEA2022 Barcelona call and twenty pieces from the .Beep Collection.
This exhibition is included in the visit tour of the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau. Tickets are required to access it. Alternatively, there will be free tours for people registered at ISEA2022 Barcelona exclusively for this exhibition.
El Modernisme és un moviment transversal de ressò internacional que s’ha distingit per integrar tot tipus de creadors i oficis per tal de fer realitat les seves propostes. Agafant aquest llegat interdisciplinar i transportant-lo als codis del segle XXI, l’art digital reflecteix aquest mateix esperit de transversalitat tot unint artistes, científics i tecnòlegs.
Aquesta exposició està inclosa en el circuit de visita del Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau. Cal disposar d’entrada per poder accedir-hi. Alternativament, es faran visites a les persones registrades a ISEA2022 Barcelona exclussivament a aquesta exposició sense cost.
Unint aquests dos conceptes, del 9 al 30 de juny, el Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau acollirà una exposició d’art digital amb cinc obres provinents de la convocatòria d’ISEA2022 Barcelona i una vinetena de peces de la .Beep Collection.
Artworks from ISEA2022 Barcelona’s open call / Obres provinents de la convocatòria oberta d’ISEA2022 Barcelona:
The Grand Tableau from Cité Mémoire will be projected onto the façade of the Sant Pau Hospital. It is a journey through the key periods in Montreal’s history: the Indigenous presence, French Regime, British conquest and contemporary Montreal —a look at more than 375 years of history.
June 14 · 10:30 pm – 11:15pm · 11:15 pm – midnight June 15 and 16 · 10 pm – 10:45 pm · 10:45 pm – 11:30 pm · 11:30 pm – 12:15 am
El Grand Tableau de Cité Mémoire es projectarà a la façana de l’Hospital de Sant Pau. És un viatge pels períodes clau de la història de Montreal: la presència indígena, el règim francès, la conquesta britànica i la Montreal contemporània, una mirada a més de 375 anys d’història.
14 de juny · 22:30h – 23:15h · 23:15h – 00h 15 i 16 de juny · 22h – 22:45h · 22:45h – 23:30h · 23:30h – 00:15h
Main Ceremony
Along with the exhibition, the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau will also host the Main Ceremony of ISEA022 Barcelona, on June 14, where the testimony will be passed to the next city that will host the Symposium, Paris.
Cerimònia principal
Juntament amb l’exposició, el Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau acollirà també la cerimònica central d’ISEA022 Barcelona, el 14 de juny, on es passarà el testimoni a la pròxima ciutat que acollirà el Simposi, París.
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