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

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

Augmented window 05, Montpellier

curating, in situ installation, edition, 2015

Group show, in situ installation, edition
Curating Thierry Fournier
La Panacée (Montpellier, FR), March 9-30, 2015
Montpellier Opera (ipad version), April 5 – December 30, 2015
iPad edition available on App Store.

Works by Luce Moreau, Marine Pagès, Antoine Schmitt and Thierry Fournier.

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).

This fifth and final Augmented Window group show is based on the landscape of the Place de la Comedie in Montpellier (FR). The three artists – Luce Moreau, Marine Pagès and Antoine Schmitt – were already invited within the fourth exhibition in Collioure in 2014. Luce Moreau questions primarily the representation of landscape and the vision instruments through a practice that combines photography, video and site-specific installations. By drawing and site-specific installations, Marine Pagès addresses the human use of space and time. Developing a digital-only practice by programmed works, Antoine Schmitt creates figures of behavior and movements that question the relationship between living and machine.

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Works

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Luce Moreau, L’Horizon des évènements 2 : Gauche-droite, 2014

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Thierry Fournier, Plus un geste, 2011-2014

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Marine Pagès, Come di, 2014

Thierry-Fournier-Fenetre-augmentee-Montpellier-Schmitt
Antoine Schmitt, City of gold, 2014

Credits

Conception and curating Thierry Fournier / IOS programing Olivier Guillerminet / IOS video player Olivier Guillerminet and Jonathan Tanant / technical consultant and Max-MSP programing Mathieu Chamagne / Mac Os and Max-MSP programing Guillaume Evrard / streaming Thomas Lucas / engineering Jean-Baptiste Droulers / set Grégory Jacquin / translations Clémence Homer and Anna Lopez Luna / production, distribution and communication Bipolar – illusion et macadam, Mathieu Argaud and Marielle Rossignol.

Produced by illusion & macadam / Bipolar and granted by European Union, with support by Région Languedoc-Roussillon, Ville de Montpellier, Conseil Général des Pyrénées Orientales, La Panacée, Opéra Orchestre national Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon and ZINC, Marseille.

Augmented window 04, Collioure

Group show, in situ installation, edition, 2014

Group show, in situ installation, edition
Curating Thierry Fournier
Royal Castle of Collioure (Eastern Pyrenees, FR), July 24 to October 15, 2014.
iPad edition available on App Store.

Works by Luce Moreau , Marine Pagès Antoine Schmitt and Thierry Fournier.

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 fourth Augmented window group show is set in front of a very radical landscape, presenting nevertheless endless variations of movement, color, depth and activity. The four artists explore and question the paradox of this view and its implications for the viewer. The project is deployed both as site installation and on tablets.

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Works

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Luce Moreau, L’Horizon des évènements, Ciel / mer

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Marine Pagès, Les Corps flottants

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Antoine Schmitt, No Disc

Thierry-Fournier-Fenetre-augmentee-Collioure-Fournier
Thierry Fournier, En vigie

Credits

IOS iPad Programming: Olivier Guillerminet IOS video player: Olivier Guillerminet Jonathan Tanant, technical consulting and programming Max-MSP Mathieu Chamagne, Mac OS Programming: Guillaume Evrard, Android programming: Henry Bernard, Jonathan Tanant, streaming: Thomas Lucas, engineering Jean-Baptiste Droulers, technique: Grégory Jacquin, translations: Clémence Homer and Anna Lopez Luna. Administration, production, distribution, communication: Illusion & Macadam – Bipolar (Mathieu Argaud Gregory Diguet Lise Mullot Marielle Rossignol)

The Augmented window project is produced by illusion & macadam / Bipolar co-funded by the European Union. Europe is moving in Languedoc-Roussillon with the European Regional Development Fund. The project has won the Digital Cultures and ICT of the Languedoc-Roussillon call and received the support of the City of Montpellier and the General Council of Pyrénées Orientales. Coproduction and welcome by the Panacea, Centre for Contemporary Creation of the City of Montpellier, Le Royal Castle of Collioure – General Council of Pyrénées-Orientales. With the support of Zinc and La Belle de Mai, Marseille.

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.

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Works

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Benjamin Laurent Aman, Dead Drops, 2013

Thierry-Fournier-Fenetre-augmentee-Marseille-Bourgeois
Marie-Julie Bourgeois, Points de fuite, 2013

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Grégory Chatonsky, À l’image, 2013

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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.

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

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Christelle Bakhache and Clément Feger, Gypaetus politicus

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Jean Cristofol and François Parra, La Borne 514

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Juliette Fontaine, Sisyphe

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Thierry Fournier, Anachrones

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Simon Hitziger, Hike in crystals

Thierry-Fournier-Fenetre-augmentee-Prats-Jarolim
Tomek Jarolim, Abcisses

Thierry-Fournier-Fenetre-augmentee-Prats-Robardet
Jean-François Robardet, The Night Shift

Credits

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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Works

Benjamin Laurent Aman, Football Season is Over,

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

Felicia Atkinson, Ardents Abris

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Christelle Bakhache and Clément Feger, Flux, prix et surveillance

David Beytelmann, Interview

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Marie-Julie Bourgeois : Points chauds

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Pierre Carniaux : Vous êtes ici

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Céline Flécheux : Fenêtre et horizon (interview péripatéticienne)

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

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Thierry Fournier : Panopticons, Fictionnalismes, Usual Suspects

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Marie Husson, Vertigo

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Tomek Jarolim, Monochromes

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Jean-François Robardet : The Belly Dancer

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Marcos Serrano, Direction home

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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.

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.

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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.

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

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.

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