Monthly Archive for June, 2011

Hotspot

Publié le 25/06/2011 dans Créations

Solo show at Contexts (Paris, France)

Press release

Contexts (1) presents a new project by Thierry Fournier, Hotspot, which 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.

Associating raw material, video, sound, interactive systems and cinema, Hotspot takes up the themes that characterize the work of Thierry Fournier: the articulation of situations and experiences that engage the spectator and the body, and the inquiry into the relationship between art, politics, fiction and the documentary, deployed here in situ.
Hotspot was produced in collaboration with Jean-François Robardet, at the Electrohop research and creation studio, supported by the École nationale supérieure d’art de Nancy and Artem (2).

(1) Contexts brings together three experts in mediation: Pierre Marsaa, Anastassia Makridou-Bretonneau, and Mari Linnman. In one common location, Contexts is a bureau of studies, production and distribution agency, and exhibition space.

(2) With the collaboration of Vanessa Hérault (student at the École nationale supérieure des Mines de Nancy), Florent Camus, Léa Chambe, Thibault Dumontet, Elsa Gauthier, Laure Goujard, Marie Laurent, Benoît Le Quan, Maxime Pellerin, Deborah Ruffinoni, Pauline Soudier, Lucile Villeneuve (students from the ICN Business School), and students from the Electrohop research and creation studio.
Coproduction: Artem, École nationale supérieure d’art de Nancy, Contexts, Pandore Production.

Augmented Window

Publié le 25/06/2011 dans Créations, Curatoriat and Recherche

Interactive installation and curating

Designed and directed by Thierry Fournier, Augmented Window is a “sensory observatory”. Different artists and authors have been invited to produce a critical reading or original work on the landscape itself. Each contribution is geo-localized and presented on a touch-screen window looking out onto a landscape that is simultaneously displayed as a live video feed on the window itself.

The observed landscape is the starting point for all these contributions, from the critical approaches and questions it raises to the very modes of observation it evokes: immersion vs. distancing, surveillance, geo-localization, etc. Invited authors produce these contributions either while exploring the landscape (in situ with a smartphone), or remotely (via an online content management system). They are superposed to the live video feed of the landscape seen from the window.

Augmented window is exhibited for the first time at the Pompidou Center (Futur en Seine festival) from the 17th to the 26th of June, 2011, during which the following 16 artists and authors will address the Halles district of Paris: Benjamin Laurent Aman, Ivan Argote, Felicia Atkinson, Christelle Bakhache et Clément Féger, David Beytelmann, Marie-Julie Bourgeois, Pierre Carniaux, Céline Flécheux, Juliette Fontaine, Thierry Fournier, Marie Husson, Tomek Jarolim, Jean-François Robardet, Marcos Serrano, Antoine Schmitt.

The screen acts like a window, framing the landscape as a real-time video. By zooming in and scanning the window intuitively through touch, visitors explore the different contributions, comparing and contrasting them. The choice of a fixed and vertical frame favors rich and comprehensive interactions via a sensory experience.

Augmented Window thus produces a curatorial, collective and prospective representation of a landscape, where typically separated approaches (art, geography, architecture, documentary, fiction…) overlap in a common critical perspective, implemented through the principles of “augmented reality”. In this sense, augmented reality is not addressed here in terms of immersion or additional layers of information, but rather questioned as a possible means for creating a field of tension between different points of view.

The Augmented window prototype was the subject of a research project coordinated by Thierry Fournier at the research laboratory of the Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (Drii program, Sensory surfaces framework). It has been developed in partnership with the Sciences Po médialab, under the auspices of Prof. Bruno Latour.