Via Crucis: Exitations

»TRAILER / »FULL VERSION-12mn / »six of the 12 scenes VIA CRUCIS EXITATIONS (with John Alderman) is part of a larger, continuing exploration of contemporary existential themes that uses a religious frame as a starting point for a secular reflection on the spiritual, political, sociological, ecological, and technological. It hopes to draw out, examine, and […]

Via Crucis: Exitations

intelligent hands

On the Midjourney interface, the prompt is “/imagine” If we ask machines to “imagine” for us, why create?  Technology has always been part of creation. Whether on mosaics or drawings we see both the touch of technologies and that of the creator. The problem with pure text to image tools is that the resulting image […]

intelligent hands

Learning From Machines

Humanity has undergone several revolutions from the wheel to the smartphone. I have experienced the profound impacts of the latter ones. These past two decades, we have tracked the convergence of machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and explainable AI, into an artificial intelligence that is poised to change the next chapter […]

Learning From Machines

ILLUSIONS

Roland Barthes  How does meaning come to image? Where does meaning end? And if it ends, what is beyond? ••  The degree zero of the image is the infinite degree of the real and the first degree of the gaze. It can take many forms, one being optical illusion when it allows visual artifice to […]

ILLUSIONS

WARIFIXATION

With the rise of empires war has evolved both toward strategy and toward an art form combining numbers and decorum to produce a “theatre of war” where one can be visually stunned by the power of armours, sounds, lights, smoke and movements. The armies then blur humans, landscape and atmosphere into a temporal drama that […]

WARIFIXATION

OFFICE CHAIRS

Every single human calls for many chairs. Since it relates body, space and work station, the office chair is perhaps the most important component of the production unit. Through ergonomic efficiency it secures the longevity of our work lifetime, and it symbolizes the power of the designer station, as it is in symbiosis with the […]

OFFICE CHAIRS

SelfCreators

A video collage of self portraits by visual artists referred to in my projects or classes. Partial list: Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Artemisia, Banksy, Basquiat, Bernini, Botticelli, Bruce Nauman, Caravaggio, Christo, Courbet, Da Vinci, Dalí, De Chirico, Delacroix, Diego Rivera, Dubuffet, Dürer, Ed Ruscha, El Greco, Francis Bacon, Frida Kahlo, Géricault, Gilbert & George, Goya, […]

SelfCreators

WEATHER REPORTS

Bruno Latour:  …there is a disconnect between the science and the size of the threat that people mention about nature, the planet and the climate, and the emotion that this triggers. So we are supposed to be extremely frightened people, but despite that we appear to sleep pretty well. ••. Weather reports are one of […]

WEATHER REPORTS

EXOPLANETS

New York Times: For a planet to be habitable, it can’t be too hot or too cold. ••  Exoplanets are like organisms in a digital universe, they are new universal devices and icons. They match a reality that appears to us in a state of nuclear velocity, at a time when our own man-made digital world […]

EXOPLANETS

DOMES

••  Celestial gaze Fridtjof Nansen  The sky is like an enormous cupola, blue at the zenith, shading down into green, and then into lilac and violet at the edges. ••  The dome designates a hemispherical vault with a semicircular and elliptical profile. It is an architectural typology charged with resonance. The Earth is dotted by […]

DOMES

EXPLOSIONS

Mark petrakis:   In movies there are explosions after explosions. They stun you into submission. There is no escape from adrenaline. And the end is often a series of Explosions as if the movie was exploding itself as a grand finale. In the narrative of modernity, they are spectacular expressions of progress. They are the symbolic […]

EXPLOSIONS

CREATIONS

Donald Trump:   Nobody builds walls better than me, believe me—and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.  Ancient traces imply that drawing was the first form of human expression. Dance, music, sounds, and environmental […]

CREATIONS

PROPAGANDA

William Gibson Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?  When on Twitter Trump quotes Mussolini via @ilduce2016  “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” he is merely feeding a delirious ongoing […]

PROPAGANDA

AIRPLANES

Airplanes have lost their mystique and been reduced to mass transportation, they throw each traveler through the grinding gears of security gates, hence pushing us through the dramaturgy of unrealistic tragedies in which we would be either on a suicide mission or aiming for martyrdom. And yet the airplane, whether as bomber or passenger jet, […]

AIRPLANES

BEES

Muhammad Ali Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, his hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see. Charles Darwin We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act. Bugs are the […]

BEES