Atelier Arts Sciences 2014-2017

An artistic installation generated through an arts & sciences research process

The consortium of Europe + Japan project FESTIVAL has invited Atelier Arts Sciences to join this project through the organization of an arts & sciences residency with the artist Lionel Palun.
The project Fresque #1 was imagined within this collaboration.
FESTIVAL is a collaborative project (Nov.14-Oct.17) led by CEA-Léti and gathering 7 Japanese partners and 7 partners from Europe (France, Italy and Spain) and supported by the European Commission (H2020 project).

FESTIVAL project’s vision is to provide IoT experimentation platforms providing interaction facility with physical environments and end-users, where experimenters can validate their Smart ICT service developments in various domains such as smart city, smart building, smart public services, smart shopping, participatory sensing, etc.

Creation/Touring : The artwork will be created in Nov. 2017 between France and Japan.

First prototypes connecting two nearby places have been created and presented successively in Tuba (Lyon – June 20th 2016), EXPERIMENTA Fair (Grenoble, 5-8 October 2016).

The artwork has also been designed to be adapted and presented afterwards in several places and festivals, recreated each time according to the spaces it will invest and connect. The artistic installation will thus embody, in a certain extent, the identity of the cities or districts that will welcome it.

Artiste : Lionel Palun, electro-video artist
Associated researchers : William Guicquero, researcher at CEA-Leti

Contacts :
– Artistic direction / 720 Digital :
Lionel Palun
– Production / Atelier Arts Sciences :
Léa Deshusses – lea.deshusses@theatre-hexagone.eu
+ 33 428 70 17 45

Both as an artist and as a citizen, I wonder what is left of our individuality and our freedom in a public place overloaded with video cameras and sensors, all connected to the several heads of a mysterious hydra to which we give several names : big data, learning algorithm, Internet of Things…
When Atelier Arts Sciences offered me to be the artist associated to a research project between Japan and Europe on Internet of Things and smart cities, I got very excited by the opportunity to get closer to it and try to understand it better. The foundations of the artistic installation Fresque#1 lays in this very curiosity.

It is driven by the idea to reverse some of the components of the world of data :
• Video cameras are usually hidden in public places, their images are being stored and analysed without awareness and control from passers-by. Fresque#1 will, on the contrary, show video cameras and what they are fiming.

• Images and data that we produce are massively stored, analysed and/or reused. Here, Fresque#1 does not record anything. All data, images or videos are immediatly digested and dissolved into a giant live brodcasted image.

• Captation from photo portraits is the data that is perceived as being the most sensitive, deeply related to our identity. And yet, it actually doesn’t really interest networks that rely more on associated metadata. Fresque#1 plays with this paradox by displaying and then engulfing right away
faces from the audience within the video stream. The few pixels of the faces mingle into the mass of data in a constant loop between the two locations presenting the installation.

• While newtorks propose to abolish space and time, Fresque #1 twists the fake digital ubiquity by proposing an interaction that doesn’t deny the geography separating the two connected spaces.
Fresque #1 challenges thus several contemporary myths through an interactive digital fresco created with today’s brushes : video, networks, giant screens – while assuming a high graphical aspect.

Lionel Palun

 

Creation 2014

1. The producer
Atelier Arts Sciences
“Atelier Arts Sciences” is an innovation platform at the crossroads of artistic
worlds, scientific, technological and industrial organizing cross search
homes for everyone to find footbridges, establish common territories and
nourish each other.
In this framework were born many shows, exhibitions and devices that are
broadcast in France and worldwide. Among these include “Virus // Antivirus”
of Annabelle Bonnery, Cinématique and XYZT, Les paysages abstraits
of Adrien Mondot, Aucun home n’est une île of Fabrice Melquiot and
Roland Auzet, Les Mécaniques Poétiques of Ez3kiel, The Terza Luce of
Michele Tadini, The Bionic Orchestra 2.0 with Cie Organic Orchestra, etc.
These residences have allowed the emergence of new ideas, integration
of new technologies in live performance while boosting the creativity of
researchers, bringing breakthrough innovations in scientific and industrial
fields – particularly through the development of innovative uses of new
technologies.
Since 2011, it also organizes EXPERIMENTA, the Fair, an arts, sciences and
technology fair that welcomed 6 000 people in 2016.
Atelier Arts Sciences is not a juridical structure but a cooperation agreement between Hexagone Scène Nationale Arts Sciences and CEA-Grenoble. Atelier Arts Sciences is administratively managed by Hexagone Scène Nationale Arts Sciences which is thus co-producer of this project.

2. Financial support
The research project benefits, in the framework of FESTIVAL, from financial support from the Horizon 2020 Program of the European Commission (agreement 643275) and from the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications.
Fresque#1 also benefits from Fonds [SCAN] of Région Auvergne Rhône-Alpes and was welcomed in residency in TUBA (Lyon) and in Lieu Multiple (Poitiers).

Associated projects