nature morte 1
Context of creation
Nature Morte 1 is the first work in a series of the same title that deals with nested worlds and the way we perceive them. Born from a reflection on creating physical "access points" for digital works, and from a desire to let my simulated universes spill over, this series has allowed me, over the years, to explore the ambiguity between the documentation of an installation and the animation work itself.
The year 2017 marked a decisive turning point in my practice, driven by the convergence of two key elements that occurred one after the other. On one hand, my work was then exploring virtual spaces through my first 3D animations, where the camera acted as a curious, subjective and exploratory point of view. On the other hand, my arrival in Quebec City offered me, for the very first time, a physical place to bring these ideas to life: a studio in which to think concretely about the volumes occupied by our technological devices.
It was at this intersection that a major creative opportunity opened up. Until then confined to the screen, my work found a way to "spill over" into the physical world. In Quebec City, I began to give body to my digital worlds and to explore their existence once they leave the universe of the Internet. This shift profoundly influenced my practice, giving rise to the material and installation dimension that is now an integral part of it.
It was in this spirit that I documented this first attempt at an installation. Despite the static nature of the setup (screens and plants in an empty room), it felt natural to make a video of it. I wanted to develop a mobile point of view, capable of exploring the relief of the volumes I had just arranged in space. Without realizing it, with my camera I was adopting a posture that extended the methods developed in 3D animation, the kind found in works such as Mouth Trip (2016) or mémoire (2017).
Detour: my relationship to 3D animation
What I have been calling "3D animation" requires some clarification, for two reasons:
The medium has evolved considerably since then; I am writing these lines nearly 10 years later.
I never subscribed to traditional animation methods.
Before continuing with Nature Morte 1, I invite you on a slight detour meant to clarify why and how I distance myself from the medium of 3D animation.
During my first explorations with 3D animation (2014, 2015), the medium was not yet fully democratized. The tools were expensive; Blender was still on its older, less intuitive interface, and we did not have the community and the tutorials covering every imaginable subject the way they are easily found today. That said, the greatest obstacle to creating 3D animation at the time was render times. To get a reasonably usable image, you had to wait roughly 60 to 120 seconds per frame, that is 30 to 60 hours of rendering for one minute of animation at 30 frames per second. And that does not count revisions and, finally, the file management time needed to gather all those images into an animation.
Looking back today, those were ridiculous conditions. You might as well work in stop motion with figurines! At the time I had both feet in a practice centered on video glitch and other explorations that took place in post production. That said, I shot my own source images (DSLR video). So 3D animation was the opportunity to create a bridge between shooting and post production; everything happens on the same computer.
So although the medium inspired me, it seemed absurd to me, as an independent artist, to throw myself into such file management projects. (I still got my fill a few years later with the Tangible Data project in 2020.)
In parallel, I was developing real-time audiovisual instruments. To do this I used TouchDesigner. Its 3D rendering engine, although more rudimentary, closer to a game engine than to a classic 3D production software, offered a crucial speed of execution: a real-time render and, when needed, a capture of that render, a little slower, around 2 to 3 seconds per frame, but at very high resolution. Moreover, this engine integrated natively into an ecosystem open to alternative control interfaces, such as the MIDI or OSC protocols, and made it easy to connect various peripherals, like the Kinect, which was then essential for this type of creation.
During this period I also used a virtual reality headset to control my camera. So although the works created through this process are in 16:9, part of their creation was carried out in virtual reality, while I literally had my head inside my worlds. It is rather a mobile and curious camera, often acting in the first person, that stands in for the character in these works. Through a fluid and uninterrupted movement, I explore scenes populated by subjects that themselves remain static or environmental.
Technically, the result is a video file, but without narrative development, without a visible character and without editing; there is no break in the experience. Calling this "3D animation" therefore seems inappropriate to me. This contemplative experience, born from the perspective of an audience that discovers these spaces through this movement, is closer to a visual art approach. That said, I do not fully identify with that label either.
This technique allowed me to create several works in 360 video, some of which were shown in domes here and there. The technical heaviness of this medium was overcome by the near real-time renders of the TouchDesigner engine, as well as by its ability to easily combine several animation techniques, including even the cursed timeline. Finally, although render times are shorter now, I keep a similar posture, but for other reasons that I address in this text concerning my more recent work.
End of detour.
Nature Morte 1, a transitional work
The title of this series is not innocent. The still life (nature morte) is a genre of fixity: inert objects arranged to meditate on the passing of time, and in its vanitas variation, on the impermanence of the body and of matter. I wanted to take up this genre and shift it to an era in which we are surrounded by screens, and therefore by movement, reminding us of this impermanence. Where the vanitas paintings of the 17th century contemplated the dissolution of the flesh, I am interested in the fragility of another type of matter: the simulated image, unstable, vulnerable to its own anomalies and distortions. My objects are no longer a skull or a rotting fruit, but screens, a USB key, a digital hand that deforms.
The word "morte" (dead) nonetheless deserves a nuance. The setup I arranged in space is indeed static, but the work that results from it does not stay still. It documents less a frozen scene than a threshold in my practice: the precise moment when my work ceases to be confined to the screen and begins to occupy a volume. It is a still life that, paradoxically, records a passage, a way of working in the midst of mutation. It is in this double sense, the fixed genre that I seek to reanimate, and the transition that this piece marks in my journey, that the title Nature Morte 1 should be understood.
It is precisely this shift that the piece ended up recording, almost in spite of myself. To understand how, we have to go back to the moment of its creation. I had just documented my first installation mockup in a shared room in my studio in Quebec City. Back in front of my machine, in that familiar comfort zone, I could not help but manipulate these images that were initially meant to serve as simple documentation. My virtual studio invites me to tap into the interoperability proper to the digital, letting me approach these new images both as raw material and as a canvas ready to receive the splashes of a video glitch practice.
By breaking the objectivity of these documentation images, I created an autonomous work, playing on the ambiguity between the trace of the exhibition and the animation. If this retrospective analysis may seem cerebral, my reaction was in reality entirely intuitive. A reflex. This transposition from the material toward the digital presented itself as a new raw material for my digital ecosystem.
This superposition of mediums becomes the very engine of the work: it is inscribed both in the methodology of creation and in the subject itself. Nature Morte 1 is structured as a collision of realities, organizing the work around a sequence of relationships to the real:
A photographic point of view on a reinvented still life
A transitional state: the video glitch
A 3D simulation
A graphical interface presenting a social network
These four relationships to the real have in common that none gives access to the real itself: they are all simulacra. The shot is already an image of the scene, the glitch is its corrupted image, the 3D simulation is a model that never had any original other than an impression of gravity, and the social network interface reflects only a part of the real, without its material constraints. By stacking them in a single plane, the work does not rank these strata from truest to falsest. It puts them on equal footing, like so many layers of representation of equal worth, where the copy tries to carry the same weight as what it was supposed to document.
photographic perspective
What interests me is not so much each of these realities taken in isolation as the passages from one to the other. The work is made of these slippages, and it is by fabricating them one by one that I give the piece its form. First, once this initial photographic point of view is established, I come to break it by moving not the real camera, but rather a virtual camera. I thus create a superposition of these two realities. The still image from the real camera is projected as a texture onto a simplified virtual environment, exactly as if I were using a projector and a projection mapping tool to project the image onto a small cardboard model of it. Then the virtual camera moves to break the illusion of the mapping and reveal a few geometric forms coming specifically from this virtual dimension.
As the virtual camera continues its exploration, it reveals a doubling: the works that were looping on the physical screens of the installation are now projected onto 3D volumes. These surfaces, invisible from the initial point of view, only emerge through the movement of the camera, thus unveiling the hybrid nature of the image.
This maneuver stages two pieces: USB (2016) and an excerpt from Mouth Trip (2016). In the first, a hand desperately tries to grasp a USB key, a symbol I often use to refer to memory and the archive. The gesture is infinite: the hand brushes against the object without ever being able to grasp it, illustrating the impossibility of concretely touching the immaterial. The second work, Mouth Trip, pushes this logic toward a recursion: a mannequin observes a tablet whose screen broadcasts the animation of that same mannequin observing the tablet. This mise en abyme, where the subject becomes captive of its own image, creates a dizzying loop made possible once again by a camera floating in this virtual world.
datamosh
Fairly frequent in my works of this period, the use of datamosh imposes itself here at the junction of the filmed images and the different realities proposed by the work.
Technically, this practice relies on a hijacking of the video encoder. Normally, video is encoded in order to reduce the file size without sacrificing its quality. One of the techniques used consists of keeping only the differences from one image to the next (p-frames). This is viable on the condition that complete images are injected from time to time (i-frames, the texture). Datamosh consists of confusing the algorithm by forcing the application of the motion, direction change or hue data of a sequence of images onto a different texture, in order to break the usual structure of the file. This technique is inseparable from movement; without it, no datamosh. It is a deeply exploratory approach where, by trial and error, by minutely adjusting the encoder's properties, I seek to bring out novel visual patterns at the junction of my two sources, while avoiding at all costs the bland, gray aesthetic of the crossfade. Carried by the organic movement present in the source video, the pixel slippages generate a melting aesthetic that sometimes recalls painting, where the colors blend before settling into "liquid" textures in which the colors are often amplified. This avoids the bland, gray aesthetic of the crossfade, which instead creates an average value between each pixel.
That precise moment when the image collapses is at the heart of my approach: the glitch does not destroy the image, it lays bare its matrix. This flattening, which first crushes the places presented in photographic shots, becomes in my eyes a reality in itself.
digital ergonomics
Once flattened, I use this new texture as a portal screen in order to pass into a new reality. This screen, made soft by a cloth simulation, falls onto a giant hand that tries to interact with it. The glitched video dimension is thus pierced by the hand. This hand touching the screen represents the junction between the digital and the body. While we usually perceive this relationship as intangible and cerebral, I stage a literal representation of the friction between digital and bodily surfaces, perhaps to recall the lack of consideration the tech giants have for the ergonomic experience of their products. This frustration that I hold toward our overly rigid technological devices has since become a recurring motif in my practice.
Finally, in this digital world with a somewhat "vaporwave" and "internet" aesthetic, a new screen appears, twisted by a mathematical algorithm. This screen presents a browser window open onto a social network. The choice of a different technique to generate it is not trivial. Unlike the giant hand which, just before, pointed to the ergonomics of our interfaces, this screen shifts the critique toward the digital architecture of our sharing platforms, on equal footing with the other documentations of places presented so far in the work: like a non skeuomorphic virtual place.
Skeuomorphism and social networks
Skeuomorphism consists of preserving, within a digital space, codes and constraints inherited from the physical world even though they are no longer necessary there. One thinks of the trash can icon for deleting a file, or of those virtual museums that reconstruct walls, rooms and visitor routes modeled on a real building, a type of project that proliferated during the pandemic. These devices reassure by importing a spatial familiarity, but they lock the digital into a logic of imitation rather than letting it invent its own forms of space and circulation.
The feed of a social network, for its part, owes nothing to this imitation. We access it just as intuitively, as we would enter a place, but a place that lives entirely within the screen and that borrows neither the architecture, nor the objects, nor the gestures of the physical world to make itself legible. This is why, in my eyes, the architecture of the blank page of a social network is in fact a non skeuomorphic virtual space: a place in its own right, but native to the digital. This, moreover, is what made the failure of Meta's metaverse so predictable to my eyes. By seeking to enclose our social spaces in avatars, rooms and a geography to traverse, the project took a step backward: it grafted a skeuomorphic logic onto a form, the social network, whose conventions were already solidly established and perfectly at ease within the screen.
Let us close this parenthesis and return to the work. This last screen, this portal toward a social network, unfolds to present a post about the work itself, bringing us back to the photographic point of view of the installation in the studio in Quebec City. It is interesting to note that at the time, the majority of my exhibitions were online, on social networks, but also in collaboration with research projects on the dissemination and archiving of digital works, such as Felt-Zine, SPAMM, Real-fake.org, or hybrid formulas like Electrofringe or The Wrong Biennale. Thus, very early in my practice, social networks took on the role of a non linear "White Cube," cluttered and noisy.
My interest in installation thus stemmed from a desire to regain control over the reception of my work when, for example, an "animation" work was presented abroad at a festival without my being able to influence the mode of presentation. I sought to question the container and the way of accessing it, far more than the content.
The Container
Nature Morte 1 is a loop through which the viewer loses their way in a series of imposed transitions. Ironically, by bringing my creation back to the scale of the video medium, this work in search of regaining control over mediums is caught within a 16:9 video file with a resolution and a duration fixed in advance. I borrow, out of necessity, the medium of video as a standardized and versatile vehicle of dissemination, applying to it a strategy to bring it closer to my needs: the infinite loop.
On social networks, this loop was a way of erasing the notion of beginning and end in my borrowed medium. One also notices, in a comment within the work itself, an observation by fellow artist Vector Newman: a shorter version would, in his view, have played in the browser more smoothly. The browser is also a container, with its own physics made of loading times, autoplay and fragmented attention, and it imposes its own editing decisions. My response, visible just below, was a little naive: I explained that a shorter loop would have broken the perfect seam between the end and the beginning of the file, and that I had preferred to preserve the quality of this loop rather than adopt a duration better suited to online distribution. I was therefore optimizing the work against its own container, in full awareness of what I was doing.
There remains an amusing question: how could I have received a comment on a work of which that comment is precisely a part? There is necessarily some trickery somewhere, an edit, a replayed capture, a reconstructed thread. And this little imposture is, deep down, perfectly faithful to the medium it stages: on social networks, what we take for a spontaneous trace is almost always reframed, replayed, staged.
The video loop responded, for me, to more than one friction, including one to which I have been sensitive since childhood: that of arriving in the middle of something. In a visual art presentation context, the video work plays continuously and the audience absorbs it in a disorder that escapes the artist's control. You see the middle, then the end, then the beginning, and you come back to the middle telling yourself: "ah, I remember this segment, I am now freed from the viewing." By creating a perfect loop, I instead propose a kind of labyrinth where repetition allows the fragments to be reconnected and confirms that what we took for a beginning is also a continuation. I leave it, in a way, to the audience to decide what they consider the beginning and the end of this guided tour. This "loss of control" is therefore deliberate: I do not suffer it, I offer it.
When I am invited to present a work like this one in an artistic context, I am often asked its duration. The question annoys me, because it seems superfluous to me for the reasons I have just laid out. Conversely, very little is said about the tangible aspects of presenting a so called "video" work: the choice between projection and screen, the size of the image, the sound broadcast through speakers or headphones, the place where the audience sits. Ironically, in presenting this work, I find myself plunged back into the very frictions I was seeking to flee.
In my opinion, the strength of time based media lies in their capacity to structure a narrative, with a beginning, an end and a progression, in order to tell a story. I do not believe I really exploit this asset. The loop allows me to escape the necessity of a beginning and an end, but I remain stuck with a linear work: the order in which the realities are visited remains fixed, and I find myself partly in contradiction with my own discourse by using this format. Certain cinematographic works have tried to play with these parameters. Their greatest challenge lies in the interface with the audience: you first have to prepare them to see disrupted what seems to me one of the greatest strengths of cinema. The "technical" clarity of its proposition and the familiarity we have with this container let us dive very quickly into the narrative content. Breaking this convention means asking the viewer to relearn how to listen.
It is this reflection that led me, at the time, toward installation. An immersive medium where the duration of the experience is already dictated by the presence of the audience, where one can present movement without creating an expectation of a beginning or an end, nor implying the slightest narrative development. This was not yet the case with this first iteration of Nature Morte, but installation opens the door to a generative and open process, capable of breaking the linearity of the video file: a work that constantly renews itself and never revisits exactly the same point of view on my virtual environments.
It is this installation dimension that the subsequent iterations of Nature Morte allowed me to better define. Without going into the detail of each one, they share a same displacement: the installation becomes a physical access point toward the simulated worlds, and the container ceases to be a mere vehicle to become a subject in itself.
Where this first iteration left the container almost transparent, the following ones make it as present as what it broadcasts. The components, the glow of the screens, the space that technology occupies are no longer relegated to the background: they are exposed, exaggerated, pulled out of their banality so that we finally look at them. The container is no longer what we pass through to reach the work, it becomes the work.
It is here that the genre of the still life resurfaces, but through another aspect than that of the image. If the vanitas meditated on what corrupts and disappears, it is no longer only the simulated image that reveals itself fragile, it is the container itself. Formats age, hardware is abandoned, platforms close. The consumer technology I stage is already a ruin in potential, a marker destined for oblivion and slowly reclaimed by the living. The still life no longer contemplates the flesh, but the mortality of our vehicles of dissemination, and the image that these nonetheless continue to emit, indifferent to their own obsolescence.
Context of creation… (maybe I cut this)
With hindsight, I believe a key element in the making of this work at the time is the fact that it was born from a moment of creation without expectation, without a deliverable. No stress or distribution constraints distracted me during this clumsy combination of well assumed digital methods and naive explorations of a practice of materializing the virtual in the real through sculpture and installation.