<aside> 🎓 Bonjour! Featured below are exercices de style as they say in Paris (where I have lived for the past 35 years). I belong to a generation of artists who wended their way through ever-emerging digital media. This meant creating “prototypes” in an eco-system of odd jobs and rapidly obsolescent tools. Thank goodness, the resolve needed to keep on treading through this emerging field was fueled by the insights and expertise of friends and colleagues.
My interest in combinatory aesthetics and interactive installations is rooted in the undergraduate seminars run by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe at Princeton University. Along with a remarkable visiting faculty brought in by Rosalind Krauss, he helped bridge early 20th century avant gardes with the then vibrant art scene in New York. He gave his students the conceptual tools to understand contemporary art…and figure out what to do “next”.
For me, informatics were key to renewing the post-war avant gardes. A second “medium” was poetry and specifically the work of Blake Leland, met at Cornell in the early 1980s. Along with photographer David Bett, we mapped strips of his poem “Gravity Waves” onto the walls of the Olive Tjaden Gallery and wove in photographs + sound track. It was an important step for me at a time when oil painting, however non-figurative, felt like something of a sand pit.
In the mid-80s, I started working at the Computer Center at NYU’s Stern School of Business (thank you Ranga Setlur) and was eager to adapt the emerging technology to art. In 1985, I began “painting with digital tools” thanks to Guy Nouri, friend and founder of Interactive Picture Systems, NYC. I did animations for LED signs (thank you Chip Paonessa) and tried to master my frustrations at being so removed from the then booming art market.
In 1991, when I landed in Paris, my cousin Laurent Sauerwein, artist and journalist and himself entrepreneur in digital design, let me use the equipment in his office every morning before his team of graphic artists arrived for work. Thus began the “Navigator” series, shown in 1992 at The Palais de Tokyo during “Les Rencontres d’Art Infographique” organized by one of the few digital art centers in France at the time, called Art 3000. I earned my living working for Luc Salvaire, an architect specialized in virtual maquettes assembled in Photoshop and MacroMind Director. I plunged into the worlds of OULIPO and ALAMO thanks to a collaboration with Antoine Denize around the intearctive poem “Un Conte à Votre Façon”, written by Raymond Queneau, and published by Gallimard in the CD-Rom “Machines a Ecrire”. I began teaching, applying for grants and testing new social media platforms in my neighborhood (see link “Association Concert Urbain”.)
It was with Florent Aziosmanoff, Art Director at Art 3000 (now known as Le CUBE), that I began to work with immersive technologies, using webcam technologies for “behavior-based” installations. The first of these, created with Ivan Chabanaud in 1994, incorporated a poem by Blake Leland entitled Sonnet Sequence, a poem I continue to “interpret” today. After a couple of art residencies, more prototypes (including City Paradigms, created with husband Berti Braun and shown at ISEA2000) I went back to grad school at L’Institut d’Etudes Theâtrales, La Nouvelle Sorbonne. Articles on digital media soon followed.
Today, I’m deep into generative algorithms, thanks to a long-standing collaboration with photographer and programmer Alain Longuet, with whom we launched B_LONG. This has provided reams of compositions that lend themselves to videos, installations and also….a new series of works on paper and, yes, paintings. I’m holding hands with a group of artists affiliated with Le Salon Réalités Nouvelles, founded in 1947 and now open to digital media. We’ve dabbled with A.I….and are trying to set the stage for the next…exercices de style…
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