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Art expert: Understand digital art, + video

gerard van weyenbergh

Art and digital technology are increasingly called upon to ally. Beyond the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence to artists, lockdowns have recently pushed institutions to strengthen their online presence while NFTs have disrupted the art market. Attentive to these changes, Citéco (the City of Economy) is organizing a cultural season around the theme "Virtual, real? », Including several conferences: the opportunity to focus on the major trends of the moment. And finally, understand everything about the subject!

1/ Art and digital: an ever more powerful duo

The artists were interested, from the beginning, in the computer and its applications. In 1955, kinetic artist Nicolas Schöffer created a spatio dynamic tower in the park of Saint-Cloud in collaboration with an engineer from Philips and the composer Pierre Henry: the object is interactive and manages, thanks to sensors, to compose its music according to the recorded movements. A first! Today, digital arts are at the center of many events and art venues, such as the Biennale Némo, the Center des Arts d'Enghien-les-Bains, or the Gaîté Lyrique kinds of visual artists, even from more traditional practices. Virtual reality, in particular, is on the rise, adopted by famous names like Julio Le Parc or Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Artists create Instagram filters that transform users faces; others imagine works in augmented reality to be discovered from a smartphone. In short, the possibilities are endless!

art expert
Beeple's "Everydays - The First 5000 Days" © Christie's

2/ Internet for material

Did you know? Online exhibitions already existed long before containment! Better: if the museums have, for the most part, only shown a preview in images of their current exhibitions, since the 90s Net Art artists have invented formats of works and exhibitions expressly intended for the Internet, like the Harddiskmuseum , opened in 2015. Net Art, which has its roots in the kinetic art of the 1960s, has the principle of not using any material other than the Internet. The works are virtual and use the codes of the networks, like the Shredder 1.0(1998) by Mark Napier, a site that generates works of art using other sites to turn them into abstract compositions. As for Data Art is not quite the same thing: here, artists use data (often millions, billions!) as materials and allow complex information to be visualized through digital or physical. At Citéco, a work by Julien Levesque will show the stock market movements thanks to four balloons more or less inflated according to its fluctuations, in the shape of the letters "GAFA". He will lead, with journalist Annick Rivoire, a conference entitled "Art and networks: Net Art and Data Art" on December 2 at 7 pm.


3/ NFTs, etc: art and digital market

Remember: At the end of winter 2021, NFTs (Non Fongible Tokens) were in the headlines. An entirely virtual work ( Everydays: the First 5.000 Days by Beeple) had just been sold for 69.3 million dollars, and as many as 22 million impatient people had logged into the Christie's auction house site - a record. Let's take another look: non-fungible tokens are based on blockchain, a technology for storing and transmitting information that is supposed to be absolutely safe. If the work exists as a single object, it is therefore thanks to the blockchain, which registers it as such. This allowed the appearance of Crypto Art, in other words works authenticated as unique objects by NFTs. To better understand the idea, last spring we interviewed the lawyer, CNRS researcher and artist, Primavera De Filippi, who explained: "When a photographer takes a photo, he can shoot it endlessly from his film. He can mark and authenticate a photo as being the original by signing it or with a certificate. Other prints of this photo, exactly the same, may be made in the future but they will not be authenticated and will therefore not be considered as originals. It works the same with NFTs. "And if it is still not clear, meet at Citéco on January 6 for the conference entitled" Crypto art, Art and the market: NFT, wallet and other acronyms ", moderated by Albertine Meunier.

4/ Artificial intelligence, an artist like any other?

In 2018, the world learned of the existence of the Edmond de Belamy canvas after its sale at Christie's (again!) . Characteristic ? Have been entirely designed by artificial intelligence, an algorithm created by three young French people from 15,000 different paintings. Set for $ 432,500, the work suddenly instilled doubt in the minds of art lovers: what if artificial intelligence could replace artists? In a previous survey on the subject, Valentin Schmite, co-author of Propos on art and artificial intelligence(L'Art Dit editions, 2020), summed up: "AI is a tool! It replaces the artist as much as the camera replaces the photographer… There are creators behind it. That said, AI is a gold mine for artists. Justine Émard, for example, orchestrated a meeting between two robots for her video Soul Shift (2018). AI makes it possible to explore fields where the artist is no longer the master of everything but the predictable and unpredictable trigger. At Citéco, you can see a work by Anna Ridler, who imagined tulips whose appearance would change in real time depending on the price of Bitcoin. The example illustrates the bewildering possibilities of AI, which will be explained at length on February 3, during the "Art and artificial intelligence" conference.

read in Beaux Arts, article Mailys Celeux Lanval

video: digital art explained


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