ABOUT ARTEFACT_LAB
Artefact is a creative studio dedicated to digital arts.
We seek to question our time and our relationship to the world and to others in this over-connected society. We are looking for the moment of digital poetry, making the invisible visible.
PROJETS
On a 9-meter-wide Möbius strip, made up of LED tiles, the names of books scroll past. As people pass by, the flow of words is disturbed, certain characters disappear, giving way to a surrealist poem.
The Möbius strip is a mathematical curiosity that turns a two-sided volume into a unique surface.
Jacques Lacan describes it as a ribbon "which has no reverse side, the outside face continues on the inside side". This mathematical object is the metaphor of unity in duality: one face is contained in the other, and finally they are one, while being reversed. This form is also the symbol of infinity, just like knowledge and literature, which has no limit except our imagination.
The public who, upon entering the place, interacts with the work, disturbs the course of the flow, which after a few seconds regenerates itself and continues its flow.
The continuous flow of book titles evokes what Artaud describes: “in a circular and closed world, there is no room for real death”.
China_Hefei_Fangsuo_Mi x
november 2020
FLOWING POETRY
The installation is in the form of a massive parallelepiped the size of a 40-foot container (10 m x 3 m x 2.5 m) suspended 10 meters above the ground. It is made up of 18,750 LEDs arranged in a harmonious mesh. The infinite light patterns crossing this volume are generated by an algorithm that reacts to meteorological data collected in real time by a weather station located on the roof of the building.
Paul Klee said “Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible.”
Le Vent de la Mer du Sud is a work that very precisely seeks to make the invisible visible.
The variations of the wind which by definition are visible only by their effects are here brought to the gaze of the passer-by in an abstract form.
China_Sanya_Fangsuo
January 2021
SOUTH SEA WIND
In this project, we seek to answer Philip K. Dick's question: "Do androids dream of electric sheep?"
Dreaming is a complex process that can be broken down into several steps: the experiences we have when we are awake are filtered through associations of unconscious ideas to be returned as dreams during the phase of sleep.
To try to recreate these different steps, several algorithms have been created:
The first retrieves the #marseille images from Instagram, the second does unsupervised clustering work which groups together the images that the algorithm considers close and finally a third uses a neural network to creates morphs from one image to the next.
The result takes the form of small video.
Marseilles
June 2021
#MARSEILLE DIGITAL DREAM
L'EQUIPE
Chen Xiongwei
New media and visual artist.
Graduate of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts.
Chen Xiongwei has worked as a creative director for several print media.
Since 2003, he has been working independently as a visual artist and video artist.
As a VJ, Chen Xiongwei has also collaborated with national and international music artists (from Wang Lei to High Tone) and followed their tours in China and Europe.
He has also served as art director and curator on theater productions, festivals, light festivals, music festivals and contemporary art exhibitions.
Pierre Picard
Digital artist and producer.
Pierre started his career in Paris as a graphic designer. Then he moved to China in 2004 and turned to the creation and production of shows, concerts and music festivals.
In 2007, he created Ping Pong Art Space and Ping Pong Live House in Guangzhou, venues for visual art, digital art, performance, music and dance.
He also creates his own digital art installations.
His installations have been presented in art festivals, contemporary art exhibitions and cultural institutions in China.
He has recently settled in Marseille, south of France.
Qiu Qiu
Multidisciplinary curator and cultural industry entrepreneur.
Producer of contemporary music and theater shows, contemporary art. She has also initiated large-scale international cultural exchanges. She has worked as director of marketing and planning for several media outlets with national reach.
She has also set up independent art spaces, planned hundreds of activities and events, and in recent years, Qiu Qiu has worked with the Argentine Broadway musical "Fuerza Bruta" in China. She has also organized and produced large-scale music festivals and digital art installations.