Thierry Fournier

Lacunes

Series of photogrammetries, giclees on japanese paper Awagami Kozo 110g, 2023
Formats 38 x 26 ou 77 x 52 cm, white wooden frame 20mm, 5 ex + AE each
Image: Lacunes #1, Rhododendron (azalée, azalea)

Lacunes is a series of prints on paper, created from three-dimensional scans of flowers and plants. Each image is produced using photogrammetry, by synthesizing several hundred photographs of the subject. The impossibility of this device to reproduce every detail generates gaps, which are compensated for by interpolations of form and color: a pictorial gesture emerges, based on the limits of the algorithm to represent reality.

Lacunes is one of the first works linked to the Commune présence (Common Presence) project initiated by artists and curators Juliette Fontaine and Thierry Fournier, which aims to develop an artistic and critical practice in relation to a place and its environment: mineral, vegetable, animal and human. All the flowers in Lacunes come from this garden, picked and photographed as they bloom since May 2023 – like a herbarium of representations that will gradually be completed.

Thomas Gendre, artistic and engineering assistant
Prints by Picto, Paris
Papers by Awagami Factory, Tokushima, Japon

Unbeknownst

4K generative film with sound, 24-inch recycled LCD screen, 60 x 40 cm LED plate, transparent prints, paper, tracing paper, adhesive, cables, laptop, bluetooth speaker, tables, 500 x 70 x 80 cm, 2022 .

Unbeknownst addresses the ideologies conveyed about science and research by stock images.

A generative program endlessly edits stock videos about science: laboratories, researchers, etc. Their slick and interchangeable, technicist and deceptively inclusive aesthetic could apply equally well to corporations or startups. These images, stripped of reality and of any conflict, convey an ideology of progress, efficiency and performance. On these videos, the film superimposes sentences that question them.

The installation presents this film on a very long table, on a laptop, a disassembled screen and 75 prints on transparencies of images from the film and sentences. It forms like a constantly renewed flow that would always be identical. What is the impact of these images? How do they contribute to a collective imagination of science and to the expectations of society?

Sightseeing

Live CCTV camera + sound recording (mp3, 9’, loop), 2018-2022 (French title: Penser voir)
Watch the artwork with the live camera: www.acousticcameras.org/playlist/thierry-fournier

A CCTV camera films a beach. We hear her voice, as if she were alive. The level of perfection of her intelligence would have led her to doubt and not know what to do. She thinks out loud and shares her questions: What is it? What should she look at? How to recognize a landscape? What is suspicious behavior? But above all, what’s the use of all that? She does not understand anything. As if she were in burn-out, she compares herself to the underpaid click workers who feed the artificial intelligences, questioning the meaning of her work with an anthropomorphism that raises the political stakes of these devices.

Penser voir was created by Thierry Fournier in 2018 at the invitation of Acoustic Cameras, an online project that invites composers and sound artists to annex the real-time flow of webcams located in various places around the world.

The Unknown

The Unknown
Generative film, 4K, sound, infinite duration, 2022
In situ installation, group show Supplementary Elements, University of Strasbourg, April 25th – May 22th, 2022, curated by Emeline Dufrennoy

The Unknown is a generative film that questions the fictions and ideologies conveyed about science by image banks. A programme randomly and endlessly edits a large number of video shots from image banks evoking science: laboratories, researchers, gestures, images of space, etc. Their smooth, interchangeable, positivist and falsely inclusive aesthetics could just as easily be applied to companies. Like contemporary ‘mythologies’, these images, which are free of reality and conflict, convey an ideology, impregnated with notions of progress, efficiency and performance.

They also have a performative dimension and contribute to a collective imagination of science. The film superimposes questions on the relationship between science and reality, uncertainty, doubt, the search for truth… These texts do not respond to the images, but aim to put them in tension. The Unknown thus aims to question the relationships between science, images, the search for truth, and the notion of uncertainty. Are these images true or false, real or staged? In a post-truth era, how can we interpret them and what do they tell us about our expectations? How do our fictions and our research intertwine today? Do these images have a political dimension?

Extract from a video recording (please put the sound on) :

Production: University of Strasbourg.

This Land Is Your Land

Group show, curated by Thierry Fournier
With Cécile Beau, Joseph Beuys, Céline Cléron, Juliette Fontaine, Bruno Gadenne, Harold Guérin, Laurent Lacotte, Luce Moreau, Flavie Pinatel, Enrique Ramírez, Erik Samakh, Stéphane Thidet, Marie Voignier
From March 18 to September 18, 2022, TLJ except holidays from 14h to 18h
Photo: Céline Cléron, La Régente, 2010, courtesy galerie Papillon, Paris

The group exhibition This Land Is Your Land addresses the landscape as a place of otherness and potential common space, both between humans and with all living things. It evokes the always possible displacement outside our limits, the freedom to migrate, to invest new spaces, between humans and for other species. It also evokes, by way of consequence, the responsibility which results from it towards our environments. It is at the same time a question of freedom, welcome and care.

The project brings together works that evoke these issues from the perspective of society, and others in relation to non-humans. These two directions are complementary, often testifying to a critique of predatory relationships and aiming at a greater attention to the living. The works exhibited do not literally represent these questions but they approach them through poetic or fictional situations. Their coexistence in the exhibition aims to make them resonate, to awaken hypotheses without trying to resolve them, rather as an association of ideas would.

The title This Land Is Your Land echoes the eponymous song by American anarchist folksinger Woody Guthrie, which evokes a land (in the broadest sense) open to all, where the world belongs to those who make it live. Written in 1940 as a reaction to the nationalistic overtones of God Bless America, it has been covered many times to this day. This song has often carried the demands for civil rights in the US, from Bod Dylan to Sharon Jones to Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.

Cécile Beau, La Fontaine hépatique, 2007, courtesy Galerie 22,48m2

Eric Samakh, Pierre sonore, 1993-2022, courtesy the artist

Harold Guérin, Summer Trip, 2012-2014, courtesy the artist
Bruno Gadenne, Le Bassin vert, 2021, courtesy the artist

Luce Moreau, Hémicycles, 2018, courtesy the artist

Céline Cléron, La Régente, 2010, courtesy Galerie Papillon

Laurent Lacotte, Smoking Area, 2007, courtesy the artist

Joseph Beuys, I like America and America likes Me, film, 1974, courtesy Helmut Wietz

Juliette Fontaine, Anachorète, video, 2011, courtesy the artist

Flavie Pinatel, Les Chants de la Maladrerie, film, 2017, courtesy Films de Force Majeure

Enrique Ramírez, Cruzar un Muro, video, 2013, courtesy Michel Rein gallery

Stéphane Thidet, Half Moon, video, 2012, courtesy Aline Vidal gallery

Marie Voignier, Le Bruit du canon, video, 2007, courtesy FRAC Auvergne

This Land is Your Land is supported by the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Auvergne, which is lending the work Le Bruit du Canon by Marie Voignier. Loan of works courtesy the artists and galleries 22.48 m2, Papillon, Michel Rein, Aline Vidal, Films de Force Majeure. Thanks to Helmut Wietz, director of the film I like America and America likes Me. Thanks to the Demars company for its partnership for Erik Samakh’s work.

Just in case (NFT)

Online version: animated gif (7?), square format, 2015

A screen wonders if the person who observes it is human (“checking you are human….”). It hesitates, it calculates, a wheel turns. Finally, it stops and thanks. Then it starts again, ad infinitum.

Borrowing the language of the captchas, « Just in case » sets up a fictional situation where an apparatus would have become legitimate to detect alone who would be human or not. For a very brief moment, we may think that the screen is actually observing us – besides, does it compute when we are not there? For this entity repeats indefinitely its process, we quickly understand that it plays alone. So, after considering for a brief moment the dystopian hypothesis that a machine could become legitimate to evaluate us, one can continue to watch it, as the uncanny spectacle of an autonomous life form.

Just in case is dropped as NFT within the exhibition Instructions Follow curated by Pau Waelder on Feral File.

Ungrave

65 inch LCD screen, USB key, wood, program-generated video (1080p, 14h), 145 x 80 x 8 cm, 2020

On the ground, a very large screen shows the image of a tombstone whose inscriptions are constantly being rewritten, as if it had remained alive. Its first name, dates and epitaph are constantly erased and rewritten, often very quickly.

While the dead are those who, by definition, never respond anymore, Ungrave establishes the fiction of a zombie death, whose technology would have perverted the very principle and which would continue to bug ad vitam æternam, constantly questioning its existence and the best way to sum it up. The project evokes ironically the transhumanist ideology of an unlimited rewriting of life, where everything would still be possible, even after death. It is also a vision of hell, where traditionally the souls continue to wander and act, without never being able to get this over with or finding peace.

The name on the tombstone is alternatively John or Jane Doe. The date of death varies constantly, but the date of birth is always 2020, evoking a person who is somehow already promised to a “becoming-program”, in the Deleuzian sense of the term.

Produced with the support of Biennale Chroniques, 2020

The Invisible Hand

Series of 8 digital images, fine art prints on dibond, 75 x 50 cm, 2020
Created from photographs and courtesy of NnoMan, Amaury Cornu, Benoît Durand, Anne Paq, Julien Pitinome, Kiran Ridley and Charly Triballeau.

The Invisible Hand transforms eight photographs that witness police violence by completely erasing the police officers from the image. By raising the question of censorship and pretending to submit to it, the image now shows only the people under assault, surrounded by a spectral void that no longer has a body or face. The term “invisible hand” is one of the historical concepts of liberalism, which postulates that the sum of individual market actions would spontaneously lead to the common good.

The project gave rise to a precise collaboration protocol between the artist and the photographers he solicited and whose images he diverted with their agreement. The Invisible Hand also gave rise to a catalog, reissued in 2023 by Empreintes Digitales (Nancy), with a text by art critic and curator Pau Waelder.

Above: Thierry Fournier, The Invisible Hand #2, 2020, from a photograph by Anne Paq during the feminist demonstration of March 7, 2020 in Paris.

Catalogue

The catalogue The invisible Hand features an original text by art critic Pau Waelder, the 8 images of the series and 3 of the original photographs. It is available in print format (40 pages color 170g, soft touch cover 350g, price 15 € + shipping, see Paypal below) or in free PDF, in French or English version.

En cas de problème avec Paypal, merci de m’adresser un email

Thierry Fournier, The Invisible Hand #6, 2020, after a photograph by Kiran Ridley, demonstration of the Yellow Vests movement in Paris, 2018

Thierry Fournier, The Invisible Hand #7, 2020, after a photograph by Kiran Ridley, demonstration of the Yellow Vests movement in Paris, 2018

Thierry Fournier, La Main invisible #3, 2020, after a photograph by Amaury Cornu, demonstration of the Yellow Vests movement in Paris, 2019

Thierry Fournier, The Invisible Hand #8, 2020, after a photograph by Benoît Durand, demonstration of the Yellow Vests movement in Paris, 2019.

Thierry Fournier, La Main invisible #1, 2020, after a photograph by Charly Triballeau, demonstration of the Yellow Vests movement, Rouen 2019

Thierry Fournier, The Invisible Hand #5, 2020, after a photograph by Julien Pitinome, demonstrations in Lille, 2016

Thierry Fournier, The Invisible Hand #4, 2020, after a photograph by NnoMan, demonstrations in Paris, 2019

Hairies

Fine art print on vinyl 500g, wood, 98 x 225 x 4 cm, 2020

Body scans are deployed flat and their scale is transformed.

Photographs © Marie Boutevin, Thierry Fournier

Órganon

Solo show
Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier
September 18th to October 23rd, 2020
Series of drawings on iPad, fine art printings on vinyl, variable dimensions

The Órganon exhibition is unfolding on the campus of the Université Paul-Valéry with a series of 32 drawings created on iPad, printed on vinyls of varying sizes and installed outdoors: suspended in trees or buildings, laid on the ground, etc. This series is also an exhibition protocol, which emphasizes the specific qualities of a campus.

Their creation on tablet uses tools derived from analog mediums (pencil, airbrush, oil or wash shapes) transformed by digital processes. In Greek, the word Órganon refers to an organ, tool, instrument or logical sum. Here he evokes entities with ambiguous bodies, human or artificial bodies, which are beginning to proliferate on the campus.

The Probe

Light projector, camera, screen, amplifier and speaker, computer, program, cables
L’Art dans les chapelles festival, Pontivy (FR), Notre-Dame-du-Moustoir, Malguénac, 18 July – 22 September 2020
Please note that the video shows the French version in a church, but the behavior and the text are aimed to be rewritten each time in situ.

Video capture (French version of the installation, with English subtitles) :

A projector turns on itself, slowly, exploring the space around it. It projects an intense rectangle of white light that it moves over all walls and objects. It also carries a camera, which films exactly what it illuminates. His image is shown on a large screen, placed nearby against a wall, like a painting: we see what he sees.

This apparatus speaks, in a synthesized voice, as if it was thinking aloud and trying to describe what surrounds it. It searches, stops at details, tries to understand space and objects, wonders about this place and its meaning but also about his own status and perception. Sometimes it seems to react to the presence of humans.

The Probe thus installs in a space the fiction of a non-human and living entity that inhabits it, like an artificial and panoptic force. The apparatus can also evoke the religious expectation that we have of technology, especially artificial intelligence, whose recurring motif is the surpassing of human capacities.

The language of the work calls up several registers, from surveillance devices to images of miraculous apparitions in classical painting, where the irruption of a ray of light often represents the emergence of the divine or a revelation. Here, the direction of the light is reversed: instead of coming from the outside, it emerges from the inside, as if the space had been turned upside down to become the theatre of an apparition and a questioning of the visible.

Coproduction by L’Art dans les chapelles
Engineering and programming Etienne Landon – thanks to Ben Kuperberg

Only Richard – installation

Installation, 2018. Video (1:2.35 format, color, stereo sound, 1h40, loop), sound projection, dance floor, robotic arm, computer and program, wood, canvas, aluminum, 600 x 600 x 215 cm.
After William Shakespeare’s Richard II. Translation: François-Victor Hugo (1872). Adaptation and direction of play Thierry Fournier and Jean-François Robardet. Performers: Emmanuelle Lafon (Richard’s voice), Pierre Carniaux, Eloïse Chabbal, Aurélie Claude, Charles Gonin, Mathieu Guigue, Sophie Jaskierowicz, Marianne Kaldi, Emilie Legret, Alexia Mérel, Claire Moindrot, Judith Morisseau, Tram Ahn Ngô, Sandrine Nicolas.

Installation’s design with Jean-Baptiste Droulers, in dialogue with the Fresnoy, programming Etienne Landon and Mathieu Chamagne, sound editing and mixing with Marie Léon. Film production: Pandore Production, Ensad Nancy (Electroshop research and creation workshop), with the support of the Lorraine Region, the Chartreuse-CNES and the Dicréam / CNC. Production of the installation: Le Fresnoy – National Studio for Contemporary Arts.

The Messenger

installation, 2018
Silicone, coloquintes (Lagenaria siceraria), painting, varnish, 110 x 110 x 20 cm

Uncover

Series of three digital prints on PVC, 110 x 260 cm, 2018

Exhibition views: Axolotl, duo show with Laura Gozlan, Capa Aubervilliers, 2018

Apparatus

Installation, 2018
PVC, metallized leathers, silicone moldings, plexiglas, foam, black light neons, variable dimensions

The Lookout

Series of generative videos, 16/9e, 20’, with sound, on loop
LCD screen, usb key, sound, 2018

The Lookout (in French: En Vigie) is a series of generative videos, which establishes a paradoxical relationship between looking and waiting. A landscape chosen by the sea or a large river is filmed in a fixed shot. The image is then interpreted by a program: each movement is highlighted, like a firefly. All these movements control the movement of a reading head in an orchestral crescendo (20″ of Beethoven 3rd symphony), which never ceases to vary and whose climax never occurs.

Through this situation of artificial cinematographic suspense, the landscape and the horizon become the object of a shared gaze between human and machine, which questions our physical limits but also the contemporary forms of augmented surveillance – in which the European seas are particularly invested.

The series includes three autonomous videos: En Vigie / Strasbourg (2017), En Vigie / Nice and En Vigie / Venise (2018), each lasting approximately 20′, on loop. En Vigie / Nice is presented as part of the solo exhibition Machinal, Villa Henry, Nice, from 25 March to 28 April 2018, accompanied by a catalogue with a text by Céline Flécheux and an interview with Isabelle Pellegrini.

Hide me

Neon, 2017

Neon, 2017
120 x 30 x 5 cm

A neon shows a paradox specific to the Internet cultures: expressing the desire to be hidden in a world of overexposure.

Nude

installation, 2017

Installation (2017)
Silicone moldings, leather, screen and electronic components, video (3’09”, HD, looped), led lights, plexiglas, steel, 180 x 60 x 80 cm

Nude forms a hybrid body made of anthropomorphic leathers for gloves, artificial silicone skins and a completely bare screen, like an organism of cables and translucent layers. Nude is also this color created by the fashion world, aiming at a “natural” appearance of the skins – but the white ones. The video projected on the screen is the first 3D mapped hand (and therefore the first skin) created in 1972 by Ed Catmull, future founder of Pixar. From the transformation of animals to that of bodies, the installation conjures up images of a human being each time recreated or emulated by technology.

Futur instant

installation, 2017

Installation (2017)
Microcristalline wax, 3D print, led lights, plexiglas, wood, 240 x 120 x 20 cm

A series of hands are modified by their gestures on interfaces.

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I quit

installation, 2017

Installation (2017)
series of videos found on Youtube (32′), video player and projector, bathroom mirror, headphones, variable dimensions.
In Heterotopia, solo show, Musée d’art et d’histoire de Saint-Denis, 16-07 – 06-08.

The installation projects in the exhibition space a series of video testimonials by people in the US who have left the social networks… and which paradoxically publish it all on Youtube. The abandonment of an experience described as superficial but providing also of a social recognition, and the resulting anxiety provoke a proselytizing discourse of “recovered life”, which evokes both the born again and the collectives of dependent persons, raising the quasi-religious dimensions of these attachments.

The device consists of a video projector and a bathroom mirror that projects the image to the ceiling or height of the room, as if their image came from outside our space. The videos are in English. An audio headset allows to listen to them individually.

List of videos URL:
Amy M – Why I quit Social Media – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgdCdd6ShLA
BrookeAlexia – Deleting my social media https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Ed9vwhsRU
Cora Handley – Why I Deleted Most of My Social Media And Cut Off Most of My Friends – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l0ZAd8D4Ao
D-Span – Why I quit social media and what it did! – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljsxyN_rzok
Elessa O’Neil – Why I Really Quit Social Media – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmAbwTQvWX8
Hans Jordan P – Why I quit Social Media – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80SVzi7BEnI
Haters Keep Up – Jay Junior – The Time I quit Social Media: Experiment – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1wlWT_2DNI
Iggy Azalea – Just Quit Social Media! – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmN3_1n0ZKw
Infinite Stars – Why I Quit Social Media – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHNhDE8NVvI
Ismael Millan – Why I quit Social Media!!! – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCACOqaWZJ0
Koi Fresco – I’m Leaving Social Media… (Why You Should Too) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTbN68qvjwI
Lexi Dacrel – I Quit Social Media – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEIy-Z6pqsA
Mischa Janiec – Why I Quit Social Media – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr6qaThFx4Y
Nikki Sharp – Why I’m Quitting Social Media – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7YXOJo-78o
Paullikespasta – Why I Quit Social Media Response – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_JbfRKXdo
Set Sail – Why I’m quitting Social Media For A Month – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRbGesLcTMU
Sleeping Is For Losers – I quit Social Media – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XukglIWwNk

Oracles

series of UV prints on plexiglass, 2017

UV prints on plexiglas, acoustic foam, neon lights, 200 x 66 x 18 cm (2017)

Three text messages are generated on a smartphone with a protocol that consists in randomly writing a first word, which is followed exclusively by the device’s automatic next-word suggestions. While this process is aimed to eliminate any decision, it appears that the algorithm also includes personal expressions, without revealing to what extent. Something that could seem exclusively produced by a machine is actually already the result of an hybridization by a program permanently fed by the capture of human’s behavior.

Oracles exists in two editions: English and French

Exhibition views : Thierry Fournier, Axolotl, duo show with Laura Gozlan, 2018

Exhibition view : Thierry Fournier, Heterotopia, solo show, 2017

Just in case

animated gif, installation, 2016

Online version: animated gif (7″), square format, 2015
Installation version: video (12h, 1080p, 16/9, no sound), USB key, LCD screen, steel stand, 170 x 75 x 75 cm, 2017

Non-lieu

Series of 3 digital prints, 2016

Series of 3 digital prints, hahnemühle fine art paper laminated on dibond, 75 x 50 cm, 2016

Non-lieu is a series of images of bombings found on the web, in which the part that could place the action is replaced by the wallpaper of Photoshop. The collision between these truncated images and the screen’s surface suggests an irreducible distance from the real: what our technologies allow us also not to see.

Distributed by ArtJaws online gallery.

The Promise

installation, 2016

Series of prints (2016)
Installation version: print on canvas, modulated lights, 1500 x 370 x 250 cm

By displaying typical messages of advertising and the web in a static form, The Promise highlights expectations of control on the self and the world, and the suspension of the attention that results. Here, the installation displays three giant texts in three windows, lit by pulsations, their large scale addressing pedestrians and traffic.

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Installation created within the group show Data on View

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 21/09/201630/10/2021Categories worksTags in situ, installation, prints, text1 Comment on The Promise

Ecotone

network installation, 2015

Network installation (2015)
Computer, internet-connected program, video projection or HD screen
Music excerpt from The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives.

Ecotone addresses the relationship between the infinite need to express one’s desires and the exposure of oneself on the networks. The work captures live all the messages written on Twitter that express desires: “I would like so much”, “I dream of”, “I want too much”…

The messages are read by synthetic voices. They generate an abstract landscape in 3D, where each sentence produces a wave or a mountain. These personal and sometimes very intimate thoughts express as well love desires or life dreams as those of a pair of sneakers. This artificial paradise moves slowly towards us, without ever stopping, like an addiction that would never stop.

Ecotone, exhibition view, Criatec, Carmel church, Aveiro, Portugal, 2019

Programming: Olivier Guillerminet. Coproduction: Thierry Fournier, Lux Scène nationale de Valence, with support from Scan Rhône-Alpes grant, Dicréam grant, with support from Synesthesie.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 28/09/201524/08/2022Categories worksTags network installation, online2 Comments on Ecotone

Sous-ensemble

installation, 2015

installation (2015)

In a space similar as a recording studio, the presence of the visitors makes appear, one by one, the sounds of the instruments of a symphony orchestra during its tuning – until a complete reconstitution when a group is present. However, this warm-up never stops: the sound is held in a perpetual suspense, appearing and disappearing according to the visitor’s behaviors.

Created with the collaboration of the Lille National Orchestra. Engineering and artistic collaboration: Jean-Baptiste Droulers. Computer programming and spatialization: Mathieu Chamagne. Captation apparatus: Alexandre Saunier. Production: Bipolar – Mathieu Argaud. Executive production: SmartFR – illusion & macadam. Coproduction: Pictanovo Interactive Experiences Grant, Lille3000, Lille National Orchestra. With the support of Le Fresnoy, National Studio for Contemporary Arts and DICRéAM (CNC – Culture and Communication Ministry).

Orchestra photograph © Ugo Ponte 2015

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 26/07/201530/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, sound works

Ghostwriter

series of 4 sound pieces

Série of 4 sound pieces, 2012
Bruno (30″), Heather (30″), Julie (30″), Senator (30″)
Radio creation for Festival Bouillants

Four synthetic voice play the same radio message and make it proliferate and rave with their own codes: erotic dream, political language, call center, American tourist.

Image: Heather, score.

Production : Festival Bouillants #4.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 02/04/201518/11/2020Categories worksTags sound works

Ex/if

Series of videos, 2014

Series of 3 videos, HD 16/9 (5’06, 1’43, 0’50), 2014

The EX/IF short videos series were filmed in Japan. They relate situations where the human and urban environment behaves itself like an organism or a machine: the abstract urban flow of Tokyo filmed at night from the top of a tower (#1, Mori), a tennis training with a crowd where each player shouts the description of his action (#2, Service), a panoptic device on a building roof, where the accumulation of CCTV and surveillance sensors seems to be compensated by ambient music (#3, Cool). To account for the spontaneous nature of these phenomena, the videos are rendered without any editing, hence their title which refers to the raw metadata format of digital images.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 15/11/201430/10/2021Categories worksTags video1 Comment on Ex/if

Precursion

network installation, 2014

In situ and network installation, 2014

The installation Precursion questions the relationships between democracy, communication and spectacle. A program randomly assembles: video footage made in the surroundings of the exhibition; news feeds in real time; and excerpts of blockbusters’ musics. It generates an infinite video, by combining these three elements. The resulting layering of meanings – sometimes comical, sometimes tragic – highlights a general storytelling shared by TV, reality shows and the blockbusters, that are always centered on the imminence of events or even disasters : the attention economy at work. The work always implies a 2-days session on location to shoot the videos.

Precursion was created within a residency in digital arts at Maison Populaire (Montreuil, FR) in 2014. Photograph by Emile Oroumov.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/10/201430/10/2021Categories worksTags generative installation, video1 Comment on Precursion

Augmented window 03, Marseille

curating, in situ installation, edition, 2013

Group show, in situ installation, edition
Curating Thierry Fournier
Panorama, Friche La Belle de Mai, Marseille, May 11 – Dec 30, 2013
iPad edition available on App Store

Works by Benjamin Laurent Aman, Marie-Julie Bourgeois, Grégory Chatonsky and a collective formed by Christine Breton, Jean Cristofol, Thierry Fournier and Jean-François Robardet.

The Augmented window project proposes an interactive window on a landscape as a collective exhibition protocol. A specific vantage point on a landscape is filmed continuously by a camera. Several artists and authors are invited to create works that take this landscape as their point of departure: videos, interactive works, drawings, recordings, interviews… These contributions are laid over the camera footage, and transmitted live on a large tactile screen, which is set up vertically. To discover the works, viewers browse this “window” into the image’s spatial depth. The Augmented window project offers a collective interpretation of a landscape, by bringing together approaches that are usually dissociated (art, humanities, documentary).

The third Augmented window exhibition frames the landscape of Marseille’s northern neighborhoods, the camera being aimed at the Silo d’Arenc. Its point of view is turned away from the downtown area’s large urban projects, and towards a landscape that is free of any monuments and is undergoing a complete transformation, on the sidelines of the [Capital of Culture] program’s official events – as an example, since the exhibit’s opening in May 2013, a skyscraper was built in the middle of the image… The installation is exhibited at the Friche la Belle de Mai / Panorama.

With Dead Drops, Benjamin Laurent Aman films the burial of 5 wrapped objects in different spots Marseille’s landscape. Marie-Julie Bourgeois’ Vanishing points replaces the city’s skyline with those of nine distant cities, broadcast in real time. The collective formed by Christine Breton, Jean Cristofol, Thierry Fournier and Jean-François Robardet, produced Ultima Thulé, four views onto the landscape of the northern neighborhoods, in which the viewer’s gesture must closely follow his gaze. Finally, with A l’image, Grégory Chantonsky establishes as the device’s backdrop the words of a machine that reproduces a couple’s conversation as they tirelessly offer comments about the landscape.

Works

Benjamin Laurent Aman, Dead Drops, 2013

Marie-Julie Bourgeois, Points de fuite, 2013

Grégory Chatonsky, À l’image, 2013

Jean Cristofol, Thierry Fournier et Jean-François Robardet, Ultima Thulé, 2013

Publication on tablets

Augmented window 03 in Marseille is published on iPad simultaneously with this catalogue, and can be downloaded on App Store. The interactive application gives the possibility of experimenting the artworks on the landscape, transmitted live in streaming

Credits

Production : Zinc, Marseille Provence Capitale de la Culture 2013, Le Silo Ville de Marseille, avec le soutien de Höfn et de Hôtel du Nord.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/05/201330/10/2021Categories curating, worksTags in situ, installation, landscape1 Comment on Augmented window 03, Marseille

Ultima Thulé

series of 4 videos, 2013

Series of 4 videos, 2013
Created with Augmented Window 03 project, Marseille, 2013
Christine Breton, Jean Cristofol, Thierry Fournier and Jean-François Robardet

The Ultima Thulé series consists in four video loops shot in Northern districts of Marseilles: the Viste ravine; Oppidum of Castellas ; the Tour Sainte district and the Lyon and Zoccola streets with the Coptic church and the clandestine flea market. The viewer access to the course of a view drawed by a body in these urban spaces.

The Greek explorer Pytheas, who was based in Marseilles, is the first to have written of “Thule” after his travels between 330 BC and 320 BC to the undiscovered islands of the North beyond Britain. Since the Medieval period, the word refers to the borders of Europe and by extension to the farthest lands we could point out.

Production : Zinc / Friche de la Belle de Mai, with the support and guidance of Dominique Poulain in Höfn. Many thanks to Emil Elias, Father Aghnatyous Ava Mina and the community of the Coptic Church of Marseilles.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/03/201330/10/2021Categories worksTags collaboration, video

Dépli

installation, 2013

Installation, 2013
In dialog with the movie Last Room by Pierre Carniaux

Artist Thierry Fournier teamed up with director Pierre Carniaux to create together a diptych, composed of the interactive artwork on iPad Dépli and the film Last Room, both based on the same footage in Japan. The project proposes a new form of cinematographic writing that engages the viewer’s gaze, status and practice.

The film Last Room combines stories shot in hotel rooms with a collective history surrounding the abandoned island of Gunkanijima. It deals with the relationship between the collective and the intimate, the spoken word and the landscape.

Dépli enables viewers to navigate through the film’s shots and space-time, using a tactile interface. A “playable” cinema, in which the viewer reclaims, through his gestures, part of the cinematographic writing. Developed on iPad, Dépli can be experienced individually at home or collectively, in an exhibition context or in a movie theater – after or before the film. The film’s space-time is treated as a seamless on-going matter in which the spectator navigates, through a tactile interface that involves him physically. This navigation can be felt as the path of a body and a gaze : moving within temporality, sliding or mixing from one shot to another, playing variations of the shot’s speed… Using an interface on tablet, Dépli can be showed and played in movie theaters, exhibitions or at home.

Publications and prizes

In March 2013, Shellac and Pandore have published a collector box
In 2013, Shellac et Pandore Édition published trilingual special box Last Room / Dépli including the film DVD, the Dépli iPad application and a critical book dedicated to the project, with texts by Philippe Avril, Nicolas Feodoroff, Jean-Pierre Rehm, Anne-Lou Vicente, Pierre Carniaux and Thierry Fournier.

Last Room / Dépli was selected by Hors Pistes Festival (Centre Pompidou, Paris), ZKM Karksruhe within the “10 best art apps” competition and exhibition in 2013. It received the “special jury prize for interactive cinema” at Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montréal Canada) in 2013. See also special issue of Archée online art magazine dedicated to the project.

Programing Olivier Guillerminet and Jonathan Tanant. Production: Lux scène nationale de Valence – Pandore – DICRéAM – Scène nationale d’Evreux Louviers.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/01/201330/10/2021Categories worksTags app, cinema, interactive installation5 Comments on Dépli

Noli me tangere

installation, 2013

installation, 2013

A wall of speakers and a microphone generate a huge saturated sound feedback whose intensity is increasing as the visitors approach them. Each gesture modulates the sound, involving a specific perception of our own presence, as well as the sensation of a living being standing in the room.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 11/01/201330/10/2021Categories worksTags installation, sound works

See you

installation, 2008-2012

Installation, 2008-2012
French title : A+

In an urban space, a large steel stele shows a screen that broadcasts exactly the image seen behind it, like a window – but constantly delayed by 24 hours. The public is in turn actor and viewer of the same scene, between those who pass in the image and those who observe them. A future and a past face each other, through a screen.

Production Lille3000 and Pandore Production, executive production Bipolar. With the sipport of Le Cube.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/10/201230/10/2021Categories worksTags installation4 Comments on See you

Augmented window 02, Prats-de-Mollo

Curating, in situ installation, edition, 2012

Group show, in situ installation, edition
Curated by Thierry Fournier
Prats-de-Mollo / Fort Lagarde, July 2012 – July 2017
iPad edition available on App Store

Works by Christelle Bakhache and Clément Feger, Jean Cristofol and François Parra, Juliette Fontaine, Thierry Fournier, Simon Hitziger, Tomek Jarolim and Jean-François Robardet.

The Augmented window project proposes an interactive window on a landscape as a collective exhibition protocol. A specific vantage point on a landscape is filmed continuously by a camera. Several artists and authors are invited to create works that take this landscape as their point of departure: videos, interactive works, drawings, recordings, interviews… These contributions are laid over the camera footage, and transmitted live on a large tactile screen, which is set up vertically. To discover the works, viewers browse this “window” into the image’s spatial depth. The Augmented window project offers a collective interpretation of a landscape, by bringing together approaches that are usually dissociated (art, humanities, documentary).

The second Augmented Window exhibition frames the mountain landscape in front of Fort Lagarde, in the Eastern Pyrénées mountains, at the Spanish border. In Gypaetus Politicus, Christelle Bakhache and Clément Feger use the particular case an endangered bird to address the spatial representations of political regulations. Jean Cristofol and François Parra crossed the landscape of the window in its entirety, in order to create La Borne 514, a series of recordings that deal with the question of borders and the way they contribute to the organization of space. With Ós and Sisyphe, two pieces – one of which is interactive – that associate drawing and layering over the environment, Juliette Fontaine brings together the landscape’s time frames, the painting and the viewer. Simon Hitziger created Hike in Crystals, a series of videos composed of elements collected during a solitary hike up the Costabonne peak; he works on differences of scale, fragility, and the alterations in state that occur in nature. With Abcisses and Exergues, two series of generative or interactive videos, Tomek Jarolim connects the landscape’s color, the digital device of the window, and the viewer’s gestures. Jean-François Robardet works on the notion of defense and the blood contained in the landscape with the series Night Shift, which associates six interactive drawings and a video. Thierry Fournier created three series of three videos, three photographs and one interactive installation, Anachrones, I’m not there and Deep House, that both deal with the paradoxical relationships of projections, specters, and willingness to control, that we maintain with nature.

Works

Christelle Bakhache and Clément Feger, Gypaetus politicus

Jean Cristofol and François Parra, La Borne 514

Juliette Fontaine, Sisyphe

Thierry Fournier, Anachrones

Simon Hitziger, Hike in crystals

Tomek Jarolim, Abcisses

Jean-François Robardet, The Night Shift

Credits

Production Région Languedoc Roussillon et Pandore. Production déléguée Pandore et / Bipolar

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/07/201230/10/2021Categories curating, worksTags in situ, installation, landscape

Anachrones

series of videos, 2012

Series of videos (2012)
Cloud (2’25”), Mountain (3’36”), Run (2’25”)
Fenêtre augmentée, Prats-de-Mollo (66), 2012 – 2017

Anachrones addresses the relationship between landscape, human and time: not through the manifestation of the natural elements, but at a very large scale, that would evoke the origins of the Earth, as well as events that may happen in a distant future. His figures are a-temporal: they may be fictional, or take place in a parallel universe.

One deploys a mountain of smoke that grows and fades, the second a cloud that rises from the horizon to dissolve in a valley: the third raises two living forms on a mountainside.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/07/201230/10/2021Categories worksTags in situ, installation, video

Deep House

installation, 2012

Interactive video, 2012
Augmented Window project, Prats-de-Mollo (FR) 2012-2017.

A farm in the landscape becomes a dance club, awakened by the touch of the spectator: a dream of intrusion and control, immediately becoming paltry.

Video documentation:

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/07/201230/10/2021Categories worksTags in situ, installation, video

I’m not there

in situ photographs, 2012

Series of photographs (2012)
Augmented Window project, Prats-de-Mollo (FR) – July 2012 / October 2017

Composed of digital photographs superposed on a live environment, I’m not there proposes contradictory stimuli. The project works on the expectation that we bring to a landscape, by subjecting it to archetypal figures.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/06/201230/09/2018Categories worksTags in situ, photography

Augmented window

curating series, installations and editions, 2011-2015

Curating series, in situ installations and editions, 2011-2015
Curated by Thierry Fournier

Augmented window proposes an interactive window on a landscape as a collective exhibition protocol. A specific vantage point on a landscape is filmed continuously by a camera. Several artists and authors are invited to create works that take this landscape as their point of departure: videos, interactive works, drawings, recordings, interviews… These contributions are laid over the camera footage, and transmitted live on a large tactile screen, which is set up vertically. To discover the works, viewers browse this “window” into the image’s spatial depth. The Augmented window project offers a collective interpretation of a landscape, by bringing together approaches that are usually dissociated (art, humanities, documentary). The concept of “augmented reality” is hijacked in this case, in a deliberately minimal sense: the main point is the confrontation between the works, the authors, and their points of view, through a protocol that also includes in situ residences, meetings, publications, etc…

From its very beginnings, the project was designed to be created successively in several locations. Each window constitutes a specific exhibition, devoted to a specific site, with a new group of artists invited to work with the chosen site: Montpellier in 2015, Collioure in 2014, Marseille in 2013, Prats de Mollo in 2012, Paris in 2011.

Download the iPad editions on App Store:
Augmented window 04 Collioure
Augmented window 03 Marseille
Augmented window 02 Prats

Download the project catalogue Flatland on App Store.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/06/201130/10/2021Categories curating, worksTags in situ, installation, landscape8 Comments on Augmented window

Open Source

installation, 2008-2011

Installation, 2008-2011

The installation is made up of an ellipse-shaped, shallow translucent basin of water, in front of which stands a multitouch interface. It enables the audience to draw a word or make a sketch directly with their hand, as if in the condensation on a window pane. Once a drawing is finished, it appears on the surface of the pool and drifts about with the others. The oldest sketches gradually fade out and make way for new ones.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/06/201130/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, sound works, video7 Comments on Open Source

Augmented window 01, Paris

curating and in situ installation, 2011

Group show and in situ installation
Curated by Thierry Fournier
Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2011

Works by Céline Flécheux (philosopher and critique), David Beytelmann (historian and philosopher), Pierre Carniaux (filmmaker), Benjamin Laurent Aman, Félicia Atkinson, Ivan Argote, Marie-Julie Bourgeois, Juliette Fontaine, Thierry Fournier, Marie Husson, Tomek Jarolim, Jean-François Robardet, Marcos Serrano, Antoine Schmitt (artists), Christelle Bakhache and Clément Feger (researchers at Sciences Po Medialab).

The Augmented window project proposes an interactive window on a landscape as a collective exhibition protocol. A specific vantage point on a landscape is filmed continuously by a camera. Several artists and authors are invited to create works that take this landscape as their point of departure: videos, interactive works, drawings, recordings, interviews… These contributions are laid over the camera footage, and transmitted live on a large tactile screen, which is set up vertically. To discover the works, viewers browse this “window” into the image’s spatial depth. The Augmented window project offers a collective interpretation of a landscape, by bringing together approaches that are usually dissociated (art, humanities, documentary).

Augmented Window premiered at the Centre Pompidou at the Futur en Seine festival, between June 17th and 26th, 2011. The exhibition was located at the top of the escalators, on the sixth floor, with the window pointed towards Paris and the Halles district. 16 artists and authors produced 158 artworks. This first edition enabled to experiment with each of the project’s dimensions: on the one hand, its structuring dimension, as a protocol that structured the curatorial approach, the work with the artists, the types of pieces they proposed, and the work protocol, and on the other, the physical dimension of the object itself.

Works

Benjamin Laurent Aman, Football Season is Over,

Ivan Argote : Sans titre, 2010 (réédition) / Jobs

Felicia Atkinson, Ardents Abris

Christelle Bakhache and Clément Feger, Flux, prix et surveillance

David Beytelmann, Interview

Marie-Julie Bourgeois : Points chauds

Pierre Carniaux : Vous êtes ici

Céline Flécheux : Fenêtre et horizon (interview péripatéticienne)

Juliette Fontaine : Les Invisibles / J’ai rêvé la nuit verte / Nuages flottants,

Thierry Fournier : Panopticons, Fictionnalismes, Usual Suspects

Marie Husson, Vertigo

Tomek Jarolim, Monochromes

Jean-François Robardet : The Belly Dancer

Marcos Serrano, Direction home

Antoine Schmitt, No-control Tower

Research

The project gave the frame of a research coordinated by Thierry Fournier, who put together a group of designers, graphic designers and developers that worked in collaboration with Ensad’s Ensadlab (Diip program / Sensibles Surfaces axis) and Sciences Po’s Medialab. Artists researchers Marie-Julie Bourgeois and Tomek Jarolim were later invited to participate to the Prats-de-Mollo 2012 and Marseille 2013 exhibitions.

Credits

Production : Ile de France Region / Cap Digital, Languedoc Roussillon Region, Pandore Production, executive production by Pandore Production and Aquilon.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/06/201130/10/2021Categories curating, worksTags in situ, installation, landscape1 Comment on Augmented window 01, Paris

Fictionnalisms

series of 7 in situ photographs, 2011

Series of in 7 situ photographs, 2011
Augmented window exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Superposed in transparency on the real time video of the Paris landscape, seven photographs install signs of surveillance in the urban environment, provoking a “scrutation of the abnormal”.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/06/201130/09/2018Categories worksTags in situ, photography, prints

Hotspot

installation, 2011

installation, 2011

The installation fills the entire exhibition space as well as exterior display surfaces. Crushed underfoot, glass debris smashes as spectators cross the exhibition floor. Amplified and distorted, these sounds are mixed with sound bytes from disaster films. Meanwhile, media coverage broadcasts breaking news and current affairs reports to the street outside, it too under surveillance via video and sound recordings, mapping, etc. A derisive theater of operations, the exhibition creates an interface between these worlds of observation and surveillance: inside and outside, mutually threatening, where the spectator is both observer and protagonist. The storytelling of fear in experimentation.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/04/201130/10/2021Categories exhibition, worksTags in situ, installation1 Comment on Hotspot

Usual Suspects

installation, 2011

Interactive installation, 2011
Camera, computer, real time program, projection or screen

A program frames in a red rectangle any moving person or object. The device is extremely sensitive and reacts to any movement: passers-by but also objects, leaves, light reflections, etc. Using a CCTV system rendered absurd by the indiscriminate nature of the machine, the installation stages the fictionalisation of reality shared by the “surveillance society” and blockbuster films: law enforcement as a spectacle.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 02/04/201130/10/2021Categories worksTags CCTV, interactive installation, video1 Comment on Usual Suspects

Set-up

sound installation, 2011

Sound installation, 2010-2014

Set-up is a sound installation that gives orders to exhibition visitors, in the tone of service and security messages: “Everything’s going to be alright”, “Everybody down!”, “If you’re young, rebel against older people”, etc. Playing on the ambiguity between artwork and service messages, Setup suggests a fantasy of control of the spectators, to which the apparatus addresses itself, as if to visitors of an amusement park or an hostile environment.

The texts include quotations proposed by Jean-François Robardet.
Voice: Juliette Fontaine.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/02/201130/10/2021Categories worksTags installation, sound works2 Comments on Set-up

Limbo

installation, 2011

Installation, 2011
Camera, computer, real time program, IR lights, projection, variable dimensions.

Limbo confronts the audience with spectral shapes that seem to be generated by their own movements, but in a different space and temporality. Blurred and saturated, reversed, delayed and extremely slow, these white shadows look similar to the humans, as they seem irreducibly foreign.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/02/201130/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, video

Entrelacs

interactive video creation for the dance, 2010

Interactive video creation
dance project by Lionel Hoche, 2010

Entrelacs transposes the codes of the fantasy in the field of choreography. Five dancers perform the piece, in dialogue with an interactive video creation. Played on stage, the music is composed mainly of contemporary pieces for organ. A write of duality – ghosts, disappearances, duplication – thus unfolds in a close interlinking of body, space, image and music.

The relationship between the visible and the invisible is the starting point for the creation of interactive video. The forms inherit particularly from the fantasy film, while deploying a larger work on the ambiguities of perception appearances oscillations, temporal shifts, scaling, loss of consistency of the body … These visual phenomena are generated by the dancers’ movements , which are scanned by cameras. Worked exclusively in black and white, using organic aspects of video (vibrations, feedback …), they create a close relationship between gesture, space and temporality. The dancers become in turn the instigators, interlocutors or opponents of the phenomena they face. The interactivity of the image becomes the vector multiple relationships between animate and inanimate, past and present, immanent and absent, living and dead, body and space.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 02/01/201030/10/2021Categories worksTags dance, interactive installation, theater, video

Fermata

installation, 2009

Installation, 2009

In a gallery’s window, a camera films the street. Its image is projected on a large screen behind it. As soon as one or more visitors enter the room, the video’s speed is disturbed by their movements and gestures. If the visitor stops, the image is frozen but a vibration, which reacts to the slightest gesture, lives on. While image and sound are frozen, the camera goes on recording the image of the street: if the visitor moves again, the video starts up again, speeded up, and becomes gradually synchronized with the real time outside. Passers-by see themselves in a mirror controlled by other observers, who are themselves part and parcel of the scene seen through the window. The illusion of a power over time becomes the springboard for a generalized loop of exhibition and collective interaction.

Point d’orgue was created in 2009 within the frame of a residency at Kawenga (Montpellier, FR).

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/11/200930/10/2021Categories worksTags in situ, interactive installation, video2 Comments on Fermata

Infocus

installation, 2009

Installation, 2009

A series of fixed-focus photographs of the body are taken with an extremely short depth of field, the position of the operator being the only variable parameter. Almost entirely blurred, these photographs are projected with a slide projector on autofocus mode, thus unable to stabilize itself. A slight movement results from this permanent oscillation. The apparatus associates three instabilities and focusing concerns: from operator, the projector and the spectator.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/10/200930/09/2018Categories worksTags installation, projection1 Comment on Infocus

Reanimation

interactive performance for a dancer and spectators, 2008

performance for a dancer and spectators (2008)
Samuel Bianchini, Thierry Fournier and Sylvain Prunenec

Reanimation is both an installation and a performance: a dancer and spectators share the same apparatus. A dark and square playground is divided in two parts by a screen, on which is projected the image of a dense fog. On both sides of the screen, the dancer and the spectators face one to each other. The fog is quite opaque, but the presence of the spectators provokes the apparition of black and moving shadows which allow to see thru them. The dancer explores this shared space and this variable conditions of visibility. He is in constant relationship with the public and the music, which is completely generated in real time by his movements. In this active confrontation, the performance is the result of the spectator’s behavior, as well as of the dancer’s.

Coproduction École nationale supérieure d’art de Nancy, Atelier de recherche et de création ElectroShop, Alliance Artem, Espace Pasolini Théâtre international (Valenciennes), with support from Région Lorraine, Groupe ICN and SFR-Cegetel. Photographs Samuel Bianchini and Thierry Fournier.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/11/200830/10/2021Categories worksTags dance, interactive installation, performance2 Comments on Reanimation

Frost

performance, 2008

Performance, 2008
Thierry Fournier (apparatus and performance) / Jean-François Robardet (sculpture and text). Part of the Outside lectures performances series.

The journey done by a performer with a microphone on a polystyrene sculpture, becomes the sound metaphore of a polar landscape and architecture. The sculpture faces a bass amplificator on which the microphone is plugged, at the limit of the feedback, its sound transformed by a program into grans, rumblings and cracklings. The sound is permanently modulated by the performer’s gesture who modulates and excites the resonances in the sculpture’s holes. A gesture and a dance result of these actions, searching a balance between motion, sound and protection against the sound threats of the apparatus.

Photographs by Samuel Bianchini.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/07/200818/11/2020Categories worksTags installation, performance, sound works9 Comments on Frost

Ready mix

performance, 2008

Performance, 2008
Esther Salmona and Thierry Fournier – Series of performances Outside Lectures (Conferences du dehors)

The actress calls the artist Esther Salmona on the phone. Esther complies with a protocol which consists in changing nothing in her daily routine and answering the phonecall whatever her activity may be at the time. A few words are exchanged: Esther describes without any pause her immediate sensations and perceptions. Her voice is retransmitted through a loudspeaker. The dialogue echoes the actress activity: movements, questions, bonds between the acting space and the space of the other talking.

Photographs by Frédéric Nauczyciel and Alexandre Nollet.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 12/07/200830/09/2018Categories worksTags performance, sound works, theater1 Comment on Ready mix

Sentinel

performance, 2008

Performance, 2008
Juliette Fontaine (video) and Thierry Fournier (stage direction)
Series of performances Outside Lectures (Conferences du dehors)

Two mongooses have been filmed in a zoo while they are watching around, in a succession of swift movements: sentry-like, turning around themselves, standing upright, keeping an eye towards the horizon. Concurrently to this image, the actress walks across the space and among the audience, searching for shelters.

Photographs by Frédéric Nauczyciel and Alexandre Nollet.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 10/07/200830/09/2018Categories worksTags performance, video2 Comments on Sentinel

The right distance

performance, 2008

Performance, 2008
Text Noëlle Renaude / performance direction Thierry Fournier – Series of performances Outside Lectures

The Right Distance takes the form of a lecture, developing a wordy discourse by an unknown speaker about a person met in the subway, with laces holding his shoes together, and endlessly repeating the sentence: “I’ve got nothing to eat”. Deliberately ambiguous between a marketing course for the homeless and a semiological discourse, the work opens a questioning about the violence of language.

Photographs by Frédéric Nauczyciel and Alexandre Nollet.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 10/07/200830/09/2018Categories worksTags performance, theater, voice4 Comments on The right distance

Foreign Office

performance, 2008

Videotape and performance, 2008
With an interview of David Beytelmann – Series of performances Conférences du dehors

David Beytelmann is an historian and philosopher; born in 1973 in Argentina, he lives and works in Paris. A series of video interviews was conducted with him by Thierry Fournier in 2006, for four hours. Two excerpts are shown as part of the performance. His work conjures up the Ubu-esque adventures of his immigration (residence permit, administrative madness, French nationality…), at the same time as it describes the successive diasporas of his family. In his discourse we find an on-going mix of his own personal narrative and an eye on the human and political issues linked with immigration. As a go-between in this filmed work, the actress shares a listening situation with the audience.

Excerpts from the interviews with David Beytelmann:

Photographs by Frédéric Nauczyciel and Alexandre Nollet.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 09/07/200830/10/2021Categories worksTags interview, performance, video3 Comments on Foreign Office

Residency

performance, 2008

performance, 2008
Series of performances Outside Lectures (Conférences du dehors) with Emmanuelle Lafon.

The circular motion of Febuary 21st 2006, voted by Interior Ministry of France, lays down the law on how to legally arrest conditions for illegal immigrants. Given they’re under arrest only on the outside, it thus legislates on what may be considered as a domicile or not: courtyard, yacht, operating theatre… A videoprojection displays the text of the circular motion like credits at the end of a blockbuster film, with its typical music. The performer faces the projection and repeats the text. Her behavior changes progressively, transforming itself towards an attack of the apparatus. The whole situation points out the warlike fiction suggested by the text, which gradually contaminates the performer’s mind, to the point of an extreme violence.

Residency starts with the music of an American war film, all brass and drum rolling, that could be Independence Day or Medal of Honor: a ceremony stirring patriotic fictions from their slumber.

The set-up including laptop, amplifier and videoprojector starts up by itself, blasting out the music and projecting an image, a recording of the performance room itself. The performer comes closer, and finds themself faced with a screen, a teleprompter, and so takes the microphone and begins to read the scrolling text. Their face appears as a close-up on the videoprojection, the camera’s point of view is that of a computer filming its user—except that the face is entirely pixellated, like the privacy protection used on TV talk-shows.

The scrolling text also appears on the video projection, superimposed on the face, at the same time as it appears on the teleprompter’s screen. It’s made up of excerpts from the ministerial circular released on February 21st 2006 by the Interior Ministry, detailing the conditions of legal arrest for foreigners in breach of national borders and migration laws, stipulating the steps necessary to effect apprehension “on public streets, at government or police shopfronts, at home or within housing complexes.” (Circular NOR : JUSD0630020C – Crom.06.5/E1-21.02.2006).

Given that most such arrests are to take place outside, this circular is distinct in that it therefore legislates on all spaces considered to be a dwelling or not: apartment, building corridor, pleasure craft (yacht), abode destroyed by fire, operating theater, etc. It’s in this sense that excerpts were selected to underline this distinctness.

The performer thus carries out their reading of the text, in a literally “closed circuit” arrangement, as if the whole set up—composed of computer, microphone, amplifier and projector—composed all of the content, its transformation and its very own fiction. The text is processed like the opening credits to a blockbuster that might have stimulated its author’s imagination; it progressively contaminates the performer to the point of extreme violence. The actress’ voice slowly deepens and lowers as the text lists the possible arrest locations, and the calm balance is broken when, with a monstrous Darth Vader voice, she literally attacks the amplifier with the microphone, the audio feedback creating extremely violent sounds of fragging and explosion. After a short, intense attack, the music leaves the fields of battle to take on characteristics befitting redemption, that telltale register of a war film finale, and the spoken delivery of the circular ends with its two last moments: the statement that an operating theater is an acceptable location of arrest, and the list of administrative recipients for the circular.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/07/200830/10/2021Categories worksTags performance, sound works, video, voice4 Comments on Residency

Outside lectures

series of 7 performances, 2008

Series of 7 performances and curating, 2008
With Emmanuelle Lafon

These seven performances were created with five invited artists: David Beytelmann, Juliette Fontaine, Noëlle Renaude, Jean-François Robardet and Esther Salmona. Each of them adresses a relation to an outside, by the way of a specific protocol and apparatus : following a TV flow word by word (Close Circuit), interview about immigration with a french/argentinian philosopher, absurd lecture about homeless people, landscape described in real time thru the phone, sonic simulation of a catastrophe (Frost), etc. The performer and the audience share the same space, in a global apparatus that is reconfigured for each venue.

This “theatre of operations” is part and parcel of an overall approach questioning the relations between writing, visual arts and performance: apparatus, relations with the audience, critical choice of performance venues.

The series Outside Lectures is composed by the performances: Closed circuit, Foreign Office (guest author David Beytelmann), The Right Distance (guest author Noëlle Renaude), Ready mix (with Esther Salmona), Residency, Frost (with Jean-François Robardet), Sentinel (guest artist Juliette Fontaine).

Closed circuit, performance, with Emmanuelle Lafon, Lelabo, Paris, 2007

Photographs by Frédéric Nauczyciel and Alexandre Nollet.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/07/200830/10/2021Categories exhibition, worksTags installation, performance, sound works, theater, TV voice12 Comments on Outside lectures

Closed Circuit

performance, 2008

Performance, 2007
Part of the Outside Lectures performances series.

Seated with headphones in front of a TV during the commercial break and the evening news, Lafon must respect a certain protocol that demands that she exhaustively repeat everything she hears and describe everything she sees, which is physically impossible. The flow of speech and resulting stuttering directly express the tension between the spew of information that is delivered and a saturated individual attention span.

Video documentation:

Recording, October 25th 2008 – TF1 live 7:50 to 8:03 pm

Photograph by Frédéric Nauczyciel

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/07/200830/10/2021Categories worksTags performance, tv, voice8 Comments on Closed Circuit

Step to step

installation, 2008

Installation, 2008

A video shows a fitness lesson, given by a coach with techno music and costume, facing a low white pedestal in a room. A soon as a visitor puts a foot on the plinth, the speed of the video begins to slow down, until getting completely freezed if the spectator climbs on it. The sound is reacting as well, the voice remaining comprehensible but slowing down until its extreme limit. A general and paradoxal loop is established between the coach and the audience : the “double bind” of an impossible imitation, and the never-resolved transfer of the artwork between the image and the spectator’s body.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/03/200830/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, video1 Comment on Step to step

Feedbackroom

installation, 2007

Interactive installation, 2007

Surrounded by a white blinking light, a microphone is placed on a stand, at the center of a complete dark room. As the visitors enter the room, bold and saturated feedbacks began to appear, reacting to their slightest movements, and increasing strongly as they approach the microphone. Each gesture modulates the sound, provoking for the visitors an increasing perception of their own body, as well as the sensation that a dangerous living thing is haunting the stage. The only visible forms are white, vibrating and pixellized shadows projected on the floor, around the microphone and around every spectator getting in the space. These pixelated forms are the negative shapes of the visitor’s camera caption from the ceiling: literally, they are the generators of the sound.

In this dark electric atmosphere that evokes punk music and science fiction, the visitors become both the instigators and the “willing victims” of a wild phenomenon that eludes them: a paradoxal situation of fear, self-exhibition and play.

Coproduction Ecole nationale supérieure d’art de Nancy / Atelier de recherche et création Electroshop / Alliance Artem. A documentary film about Feedbackroom has been released in DVD by Éditions du Point d’exclamation and Éditions du Parc / ENSA Nancy, 2009.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/06/200730/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, sound works, video2 Comments on Feedbackroom

The Life of Things

installation, 2007 – video, 2009

installation (2006) and video (2009)

Created initially as an installation, following the invitation of Technisches Wien Museum for its permanent collection, the video The Life of Things (Das Leben der Dinge) presents interviews of nine people discovering ten objects that have not been indexed, so that the history of those objects is controversed and for what the museum conservators do not know what to do with. Within a museum of science exhibiting a catalogue raisonné of objects and practices, The Life Of Things questions collective representations that objects are provoking when they become part of a collection, while we see nine people portrayed at the moment they are facing curiosity and uncertainty.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/01/200730/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, museography, video2 Comments on The Life of Things

Siren

installation, 2005-2010

Installation, 2005-2010
Samuel Bianchini and Thierry Fournier
with the voice of Maryseult Wieczoreck

A white dot on a black screen is following the spectator movements while he/she is using a computer mouse in front of it. Without activity, the installation diffuses the sound of human breath, barely audible. When the dot moves, the voice of a woman appears: static, then beginning to grow and increasing rapidly with the hand actioning the mouse. As the spectator’s gesture develops or focuses on a point, speeding up or slowing down, the sound unfolds and develops itself. The voice shifts from breathing to whispering, from singing to shouting, from the tiniest details to burgeoning vocals. The voice is reacting to the gesture and requests it. The sound gradually gives a shape to an acoustic body that reveals itself through the tactile exploration – although its interpretation remains offered to the audience.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/10/200530/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, sound works, video, voice3 Comments on Siren

Ce qui nous regarde

installation, 2005

installation, 2005
Emmanuel Berriet and Thierry Fournier

The installation Ce qui nous regarde proposes a space in which the audience leave traces of its passages and movements, asking words and images and being questioned at their turn. In front of a large panoramic screen showing of a large number of words and questions, the presence and the movements of the spectators triggers the apparition of several videos trating the subject of development. The project proposes an hybrid form between cinema and interactive installation.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/03/200530/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, video

Stories Machine

sound installation, 2004

Sound installation, 2004
Objects design: Zarko
Landscape design: Pascale Langrand and François Schelameur

The Garden of the Navel is a collective project based on an imaginary mythology that ironically names Pougne-Hérisson (a hamlet of 200 inhabitants) as the homeland of tales, where “all stories come from, and where they should come back”. The Stories Machine is an interactive sound installation which composes a soundscape with the stories that the visitors leave themselves. Several microphones are placed in the garden, in which visitors are invited to leave a story of their own, lasting anything from a few seconds to a few minutes, that will then be stored by the installation. As soon as it has been recorded, each story lives its own life and occupies the space. The lifetime of a story is unlimited: it is always heard immediately after it has been recorded, but it may reappear weeks or months later. The space of the Garden develops and grows with time: it is nurtured, visited and searched by the visitors themselves, like a talking landscape, organic and unpredictable.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/06/200430/10/2021Categories worksTags in situ, interactive installation, sound works2 Comments on Stories Machine

Vers Agrippine

music piece and performance, 2004

music piece and performance, 2004
Duration 12′. With the voices of Hiromi Asaï and Véronique Gens.

Performed as a solo piece on laptop, Vers Agrippine (toward Agrippina) is based on Handel’s opera Agrippina. It experiments a real time navigation through the temporality of a music. Playing with a computer program created for this work, the artist composes a navigation in an extreme slow-motion, through three musical layers: the first seconds of the overture, the first sentence of the first recitative, and the first seconds of the first soprano aria. This microscopic movement reveals all the musical matter but also its lines of forces and details, as in the aerial approach to a landscape.

Excerpt:

Photograph: Hiromi Asaï by Frédéric Nauczyciel.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 19/05/200408/12/2020Categories worksTags performance, sound works, voice5 Comments on Vers Agrippine

Ping-pong

music piece, 2003

Music piece, 2003
Juliette Fontaine and Thierry Fournier

Ping-pong has been composed through a process of sound exchange with Juliette Fontaine. The instrumental apparatus is composed by a laptop and an analog filter bank. Every gesture of the performer is recorded in real time and re-injected into the composition loop.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/05/200330/10/2021Categories worksTags collaboration, music, sound works2 Comments on Ping-pong

Electric Bodyland

sound installation, 2003

sound installation, 2003

Electric Bodyland is an interactive sound installation. Each movement of the spectators generates a navigation within an electronic musical piece which is composed, mixed and spatialized in real time. Individually or collectively, the spectators play their own composition of a sound sculpture which is to be explored continuously, from the inside and in an empty space.

Created in the frame of a residency at the Synthese Festival 2003.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/03/200330/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, sound works1 Comment on Electric Bodyland

Shadow of a doubt

installation, 2003

installation, 2003
Original title : L’Ombre d’un doute

Shadow of a doubt is a “controversy room”: a set of points of view about science, media and politics is confronted with the audience presence and actions. The silhouettes of visitors are projected in real time on the wall, under the form of white “ghosts”; they follow them and reveal videos of interviews, TV archives and philisophical texts read by actors. The relationships and proximity between sequences are constantly modified by the interaction between the visitors in the room. Each person faces two simultaneous collective experiences: one that is talked about in the video sequences, and one that builds up continuously, improvised by the visitors, in the installation area.

People interviewed are activists and association members (François Desriaux, Christophe Gérard, Anne-Laure Morin, Christophe Noisette), philosophers and sociologists (Marc Augé, Bernard-Marie Dupont, François Ewald, Pierre Lascoumes, Isabelle Stengers), a farmer (Hervé Touraquet), civil servants and politicians (Bernard Bachelier, Alain Claëys, Martin Hirsch), and researchers (Olivier Godard, Pierre-Henri Gouyon, Guy Riba, Jacques Testart).

Texts excerpts that actors read are by Giorgio Agamben (Moyens sans fins), Gilles Châtelet (Vivre et penser comme des porcs), Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?), Georges Didi-Huberman (Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde), Bernard Kourilsky et Geneviève Viney (Rapport au premier ministre sur le principe de précaution), Bruno Latour (Du principe de précaution au principe de bon gouvernement), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (L’oeil et l’esprit), Francis Ponge (Le Parti pris des choses), Armand Robin (La Fausse Parole), Clément Rosset (Principes de sagesse et de folie), Isabelle Stengers (Sciences et pouvoirs – la démocratie face à la technoscience), Paul Watzlawick (La Réalité de la réalité : confusion, désinformation, communication), Ludwig Wittgenstein (De la certitude).

Related to: Outside Lectures, The Life of Things, Ce qui nous regarde, Feedbackroom

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/01/200330/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, video4 Comments on Shadow of a doubt

Sweetest Love

film music, 2002

Musical piece (3 male voices and electronics), 2002
Composed for the feature film Ce qu’ils imaginent by Anne Théron
Performers: Jean-François Chiama (tenor), Jean-Christophe Jacques (baryton), Jean-Loup Pagésy (basse), Thierry Fournier (electronics).

Sweetest Love has been composed on three poems by John Donne, the 16th-17th century poet and philosopher, a contemporary of Shakespeare (Song, Women’s constancy, A fever). Written for three male voices (tenor, baritone, bass) and real time electronics, the piece alternates solos and trios, with a cappella and electronic sections. It explores the most fragile register for each voice, while every section is written in the same tessitura for the three singers. This required a very special care and work on tonality for the singers. The electronics are mostly based on pulsations and oscillations. The electronic relation with the voices becomes principally organic, evoking both solitude and the constant presence of the body.

Excerpts:

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 02/09/200230/10/2021Categories worksTags cinema, music, sound works, voice

The Screens

music and sound installation for the theater, 2002

Original title : Les Paravents
Music and sound installation for the theater
Les Paravents by Jean Genet / Stage direction Frédéric Fisbach, 2002

Monstruous theater play taking place during the algerian war, involving 96 characters, many parallel narrations and simultaneous scenes, The Screens were directed in 2002 by Frédéric Fisbach who chose to display the casting between three actors for the 3 main characters and japanese bunraku puppets for all the others. The bunraku company is Youki-za, one of the oldest in Japan, founded at the XVIth century. Puppet’s voices were played live by two other actors.

“The Screens seems to be a proposition for a total theater – a feast as Genet said – where the text accompanies a poetic action which takes place either on stages or screens. The Screens carry a dream or a vision of the theater which could be simultaneously a comedy and a solemn feast, dedicated to the living and the dead. A poem for the stage reviving the politics, in the sense it offers a vision of the world to the public” (F. Fisbach)

The music for live electronics, the voice’s amplification and transformation and the spatialization of every element was played live on stage by Jean-Baptiste Droulers.

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/04/200230/10/2021Categories worksTags installation, performance, theater

Architecture of Paradise

music for an installation, 2000

Musical piece (4 voices and electronics) for an installation by Marie Sester, 2000

Architecture of Paradise is a five section piece for 4 vocal soloists and electronics, created within Marie Sester’s installation presented at the SFMOMA in 2000. The piece is based on excerpts of Plato’s Timeus-Critias, which describes the role and story of Atlantis. The text is sung in its English version, by the soprano and alto. It is read in English and French by the two actresses. Beyond its original context, it evokes the concept of an ideal city, and its consequences in matters of political domination – considerations which remain absolutely topical. The piece develops a circular tension between several parts: the soprano-alto duo, the intimate reading of the text by the actresses, the electronics (oscillations, filters and saturations) and the real time transformations of the voices.

Excerpts:

Image © Marie Sester 2000. Performers: Armelle Orieux (mezzo-soprano) Laura Gordiani (alto), Vanda Benes et Lyndee Mah (spoken voices).

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/12/200030/10/2021Categories worksTags collaboration, music, sound works

The Moult of the angel

online dance performance, 2001

Online dance performance, 2001
Isabelle Choiniere and Thierry Fournier

The Moulting Angel is a live and online performance, in which two dancers interact in two distant places, exchanging music and images generated by their movements. The project explores the projections and transformations of the body through a network. Each site performs a mix of both interventions in a constant dialogue. The musical generation is based on a set of microphones, explored in various directions (gestural capture, sound recording, relationship between space and body, etc.).

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/11/200030/10/2021Categories worksTags dance, internet, performance

Core

musical piece and performance, 2000

Musical piece and performance, 2000
With the voice of Alyson Wishnousky

Core was composed after an interview with the Canadian dancer and performer Alyson Wishnousky, talking about her sensation during movement and dance. The composition of the piece is written like a counterpoint between spoken voice and electronics: vibration and momentum, changes from stillness to movement, phases of keeping and losing control, in the very substance of the music. The piece is very gestural, where the interplay with the computer and the analog filters plays an important part in the concert.

(…) it’s all about time and movement and space they all form the same patterns together at the same time so it makes the heart beat faster and the breath speed up and the body warm up and it generates heat like fire so thats where the movement and gestures relate (…) its all about air and breath and breath generates life and allows more space opens up more space in the body in the pores enters air and water and fire they mingle a continuous spiralling of the spine spiral waves waves continuous waves (…)

Extracts :

Photograph: performance with Emmanuel Berriet, ISEA / Divan du monde, 2000

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/11/200018/11/2020Categories worksTags music, performance, sound works4 Comments on Core

The Nibelungen Treasure

installation, with E. Berriet & O. Auber, 2000

Interactive installation, 2000
Olivier Auber, Emmanuel Berriet, Thierry Fournier
Performers: Armelle Orieux (soprano), Laura Gordiani (alto), Jean-François Chiama (tenor), Eric Guillermin (bass).

The Nibelungen Treasure is based on the medieval text of the Nibelungen Lied and the myth it has become: an invisible monument in the german history and in the city of Worms, where the Lied takes place. Visitors entering the installation see the city of Worms from underneath, as if the ground were transparent. Beneath their feet, the bottom of the world stretches into infinity like an impossible chaos. In this space, between the town and the bottom of the world, the imaginary space of the myth develops itself.The visitor moves intuitively in this space, as if he were floating, by means of a circular joystick that he can manipulate in all directions. All the visual and musical elements are generated in real time, in relation to the visitor’s movements on the interface. The spectators influences the content and the form of the score, and the way its parts link and mix. The instrumental gesture of the spectator leads into an experience of time: a continuous circulation in the inner matter and construction of music. The music and soundtrack of the whole museum has been also created within the same project.

Video documentation:

Musical excerpts:

Author Thierry FournierPosted on 03/08/200030/10/2021Categories worksTags interactive installation, VR1 Comment on The Nibelungen Treasure