From Kinetic to digital art : LAb[au] 's metadesing meets Vasarely 's Op art

The exhibition at the Vasarely foundation will be opened from june the 2nd to the 11 th of july curated by electronic arts festival seconde nature and LAb[au] art studio

All the kids of my generation who enjoyed the rules and games of mathematics remember the Victor Vasarely circles on the cover of their school books. Like a UFO landed in the south of France,on the top of a hill in Aix-En-Provence, the Victor Vasarely foundation has been rising since 1976, as an apparition of the future, a statement of 60 's (not to say 20's) creativity... A pact between art and architecture. Reactivated by the team of an ambitious but human sized electronic art festival, named seconde nature, the Foundation takes in with in the master of Op art 's "Integrations" (1), the legendary works of pioneer artists such as Nicolas Schöffer and Vera Molnar, with the new explorers of an art embracing the systemic beauty of music patterns, architectures and pure forms, playing with the light.

(1) Integration : 42 monumental works of Victor Vasarely (1908-1997) named Integrations appear as part of the architecture of the building.

Let's move on

Hovering on the border between art and science, Ikeda's audiovisual installation data.scan mixes into a musical piece recent data analysis of the human body with digital interpretation of flux in our surrounding world, while Particules synthesis _06/10 from LAb[au] offers to the public a 360 degree vizualisation of sound as an amalgam of seeds, a partition of elementary ganular particules such as described in Iannis Xenakis former researches.

Back to the future, framework f5X5X5 from LAb[au] seems to have found its place such as a matrix at the entry of the foundation, transcribing with it's 375 enlighthed kinetics frames the environmental datas into an hypnotic game of light and movement. An impressive installation that cant help us referring to its old brother Chronos 10 from Nicolas Schöffer (1912-1992) : a chrono dynamic artwork made out of rotating mirrors boosting the surrending space by reflecting it's own colorfull and demultiplied image. Further on, in the center of the blue room, Rota, a rotating cylinder from contemporary artist and musician Carsten Nicolaï, is projecting amazing clouds on the Vasarely monumental serigraphies, stimulating our brain waves for relaxation.

Well, lets 's meditate on the influences of such artworks taking place in the public space ! That was the aim of Op art's fonder Victor Vasarely who not only wanted to promote an art accessible to all but believed that "the furture was opening onto a new geometrical, polychromatic and solar world [in which] visual art would be optical milti-dimensional and communal, definitely abstract and closer to science". When today's priorities in urbanism seem to focuse on CCTV cameras, what is left from, Nicolas Schöffer's ambitions "to put the town in art and not a bit of art in the town" ?

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The aim of the exhibition is to confront the works of French-Hungarian pioneers in kinetic, cybernetic and generative art with young, contemporary artists working in the same fields. Presenting the works in the frame of the Vasarely Foundation, temple of kinetic and op art, is an extraordinary challenge giving the purpose an incredible coherency.

The direct confrontation between these works creates a lot of cross readings, outlining the incredible actuality of the pioneer's works as it shows a continuity within the field of system based art. I think the exhibition constitutes a strong statement about digital art being in the line of the 20's century avant-garde as it testifies a visionary, positivist and fundamental approach in the arts. LAb[au]'s projects are influenced by 20's century avant-garde and mostly abstract, minimal and conceptual art. From Bauhaus (industrial design), to the Ulmer Schuler (art concrete) or the audio-visual pioneers of the beginning of the 20th's century to cybernetic art, they all play a determining role in the way we perceive and conceive art.

The definition of our artistic practice as MetaDeSign stands in this tradition of abstract art. From this point of view op and kinetic art plays an important role when speaking about systemic art which researches its proper language. Further on, Op and kinetic art explore the perceptive and cognitive qualities of an artifact expressing its constituting elements in a concrete non metaphorical or illustrative manner; as such they place art as an aesthetic science which is absolutely relevant in the digital realm.

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LAb[au]'s work is about system based art exploring generative, reactive, interactive... settings. As such the artistic practice is grounded on the logics, parameters, of the set systems which involve technological as aesthetic, cultural, parameters. LAb[au] defines this methodological approach as MetaDeSign and considers art as media. The context, is it an artistic, architectural, musical or any other, is analyzed as information which constitutes a certain system of signs, a media, out of which parameters' an artifact is shaped. For this reason LAb[au]'s concern is less about the classification of its projects, be it defined as art or architecture, but about the underlying design method. LAb[au]'s projects are the result of a systemic, conceptual and methodological process which can be applied to different artistic practices, the reason we talk about MetaDesign rather than art or architecture.

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One of the great opportunities in the conception of the exhibition was the possibility to confront the art works with the architecture of the foundation, to select works of Victor Vasarely and to create a unique reading by mixing and juxtaposing the different selected and existing works. Therefore the classical approach of grouping the works by authors or a chronological hanging has been given up in favor of a conceptual and formal view. Here the great enthusiasm of seconde nature and Pierre Vasarely made this exhibition possible while giving place to a 'personal' view an interpretation of Vasarely's work. The conception and exchange which has been undertaken to make the exhibition possible may effectively correspond to the initial idea of Vasarely which he formulated for his foundation as being a place of exchange between different artistic practices and a place for the development of computer based art.

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The financial frame of the exhibition didn't allow conceiving site specific installations. Therefore the exhibition relies on a selection of existing art works and installations but which doesn't exclude that the unique frame of the foundation and the concept of the exhibition can't produce a new view angle for the presented works, can't reveal hidden formal or conceptual aspects, can't produce a moment of aesthetic pleasure...

But there is nevertheless an exception in the exhibition : on the basis of an existing development we have been conceiving a new audio-visual installation called particle synthesis which principle is to related granular sound synthesis with the 3d visualization of particles. Here each particle is a sonic grain, a small program evolving in space. The spatial perception of this process is rendered in 360 degree by the means of 6 projections and quadraphonic sound. The screens form a floating hexagon a tribute to the hexagonal architecture of the foundation underlining the mathematical and systemic principle of the building ; it's also a reference to Victor Vasarely's work based on bi-dimensional color surface. Evoking three-dimensionality, this spatial perception is achieved in the installation by the interaction between sound and visual shapes (polygons).

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The Framework notations are mappings of the kinetic and luminous behavior of a frame of the likely named frameworks f5x5x5 installation. A notation is a 'writing' system to compose elements evolving in time; as such they constitute a proper visualization of the process.

The proximity to Vasarely's work uncovers similar composition techniques where the repetition of the same bi-dimensional element but slightly tilted, forms a spatial pattern. This visual effect of the 'static' graphical works produces an interesting reading compared to the dynamic process of the installation where the bi-dimensional frames continuously form spatial patterns. In this manner the graphical work forms another reading of the inherent logics of the installation as the emerging patterns reveal their own visual and conceptual interest; as such they give a reading to the generative process of the installation as they become generative artworks in them self, based on 'rules' that the artists use to produce their works. They visualize the inherent logics formed by programmed systems.

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Yes of course, the works are conceptual and concrete artifacts which doesn't represent anything else than their own construct, or do you really believe that an artwork can represent jealousy? But this conceptual approach doesn't exclude an aesthetic pleasure neither for the author nor the spectator. The true quality of an artwork always lies in its own construct and as such does not represent anything else but itself. But as an artifact it shapes the signs of its time and as such has a 'meta' meaning.

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For us the exhibition in the foundation Vasarely is a pure pleasure which allows us to present our artistic motivation and which is crowned by the MetaDeSIGN book. The book release for this occasion constitute a major step in our artistic practice and presents an important selection of LAb[au]'s works. The design of the book allowed us to pinpoint our design concepts and methods wherefore we decided to present our projects not in a chronological manner but according to the systems the projects are based on. The different chapters run from 'closed systems' (generative, analytic) to open systems (reactive, interactive, performative and connective) and underlines the basis of system art. According to this principle we further mapped our entire practice which forms cartographies presented in the beginning of the book and which makes out of the book an information design itself.

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Yes digital art still has a hard time to find its place in the art world since it constitutes its own system of signs. There are still few people who have critical tools to apprehend digital art and as such for many people the 'meaning' remains uncovered. This fact is reinforced by the nature of the work itself which implies a certain 'technological' (media) and 'cultural' (signs) understanding of the setting. This correlation is fundamental for digital art since the meaning of the work mostly emerges out of its construct. As such this question is not proper to digital art but to abstract, minimal and conceptual art in general; an art which claims nothing more than itself and which 'meaning' is not 'imported' from outside. When sharing this perception on art we can extract another argue: few people trust their aesthetic instinct which would allow them to admire simply the effect (not to say beauty) of the construct without any 'pseudo' intellectual legitimation.

An interview of Manuel Abendroth by Orevo/Véronique Godé

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