Continuing the series on interesting student work…
Pascal Chirol has just arrived this year, and has been working alongside our merry ragtag gang at the Atelier Hypermedia where he is currently maturing his Flash skills into a deeper understanding of object-oriented programming while learning Processing & Java. Later, he will be connecting up physical interfaces to his programs with my collegues at LOEIL (should be interresting).
He is also fine-tuning a hillarious and yet quite elegant, and usable (!) website he created as a student at the École régionale des beaux-arts de Valence where he studied with some of the rare (but growing) French art professors hip to generative design, interactivity, programming, etc. (cf. Luc Dall’armellina). His project is called EasyDesign and it generates beautiful vector-based imagery for you, so you don’t have to.
The part that I find hillarious is that you can also ask it to build you a poster in the style of John Maeda or the French design superstars M/M Paris. For an untrained eye, I’m sure it’s pretty damn close! There is also « Easy Swisse » (LOL), and all sorts of other jokes for anyone who has gone to design school (luckily I avoided all that).
Along with Maeda’s « Design Machine », Pascal’s work clearly references things like Autoshop, Vectorama, Josua Davis (who already is a bit of his own « easydesign », isn’t he?), and anything Jürg Lehni (Hektor, Scriptographer, Lineto, Lego Font Creator). I’m sure there are others that should be mentioned, but I immediately think of those four.
This is a work that Manuel Braun developped for his Diplôme Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques in June, and which has just been exhibited in Toulouse at the Centre régional d’initiatives pour l’art contemporain. It is a 5 x 5 pixel array made out of computer fans. Each fan represents one pixel which together make a very singular display. On that display runs an artificial life program based on Coway’s famous Game of Life. It‘s a beautiful work, quite mesmerizing and yet very simple. When Brigitte Bosch from the bbb gave me « carte blanche » to select the work of a young multimedia artist for an exhibit she was preparing, I chose this work — principally because I wanted to defend a certain tendancy we currently have been exploring in the Atelier Hypermedia : i.e. the move away from purely screen based work by introducing visual algorithms increasingly into the phyiscal space. But I was also particularly happy with this work having watched Manuel’s research over the years on the infinite variations one can inflict on the idea of the « pixel ». I felt with this work that he had evolved from the research stage into a coherent phase plastique. And finally there is the fairly obvious (and humorous) reversal of the role of matérial/mimetic component, a sort of digital form of the old support / surface debate.
I don’t usually talk about other people’s work here, using this blog mostly as an easy form of communication. But I probably should talk more about my students’ and former-students’ works, as their work is so influential to my own, especially given the very particular structure of the Atelier Hypermedia. I’m also mentioning it here because this work was the first final-year diploma installation to use Processing and more importantly the PicoIP Processing library Stéphane Cousot and I developped last year for Jean-Pierre Mandon’s PicoIP project. When I look at the work we were doing with Macrodobe’s Director and the work we’re now doing with Processing, I think the change was definitely worth it.
This is a recording of my presentation during the Symposium Audio/Espaces/Réseaux organized by Locus Sonus. In the accompagnying pdf file (destanley.pdf) you will find links to all of the films and interactive animations described during the talk. This talk is in French (why the hell am I writing this in English? I have no idea)