Thierry Fournier | interactive installation

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Electric Bodyland

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.

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).

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: