Archive for the ‘Mathieu’ tag
Digital Palimpsest
To travelers all around the world, Bangalore restaurants are some of the best in the region. In a city where culture and technology meet and continually re-define each other, there are always innovations in the cuisine, but also long traditions that one can depend on. A place that has been shaped by migration in a way that is like no other, Bangalore has seen a brain drain, when the young were leaving for economic reasons, and a reverse brain drain, where they started to return for the same reasons. It’s an interesting place of interesting contradiction, and the cultural expressions here are likewise steeped in old-world traditions and new-world technologies.
It is in this setting that a remarkable new installation, “Digital Palimpsest,” comes to Bangalore. Organized by the French Embassy in India, Fil d’Ariane, Point Ephemere, Alliance Francaise, and the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technoloy, “Digital Palimpsest” is a fascinating interactive installation. Designed and created by B2Fays and Mathieu Constans, this work is engineered to make works of electronically-generated visual art that are then modified by the viewer’s participation. The spectator’s image is projected into the work, and electronic impulses measure the body movements and vocal impressions to change the work while it is in motion.
This exciting new work is part of a global trend toward digital art, and it would be no surprise to find it in Bangalore, with a reputation for being on the cutting edges of technology. The French artists developing the work are also participating in an exciting collaborative action that moves the work to muti-national proportions. It is very interesting to note that the social landscape of Bangalore, shaped by a shifting identify based on leaving and returning, with constantly transforming versions of self, finds itself metaphorically represented in this work. In a kind of marriage of art and life, the impressions left by the visitor are impossible to control, and difficult to measure, but absolutely there in the landscapes of living memory.