Hi i'm Kaspar Ravel (they/them), an artist, educator and critical new media theorist.

As a self-taught coder, DIY hacker and lowtech enthusiast I find pleasure in questionning the role of tech. This research takes the form of tentatives, poelitic solutions that vary from personnal use cases (like finding alternatives to google maps) up to broader societal issues (such as nuclear waste management).

During the day I'm a resident at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. And on the offtime I'm a member at OYÉ label, designing scenography and lights for events, performing live audiovisually on stage, and more occasionaly mixing for radio shows and small events.

  • 09.24   Unikradioshow @ Radio Campus, Toulouse, France
  • 09.08   Qu'est-ce qu'on Fleix, Le Fleix, France
  • 08.12   DJ @ Le Badoux, Monfaucon, France
  • 06.27   ~shortwave @ Egregore Radio
  • 06.04   Artefacts du Nucléaire @ Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, France
  • 05.31   OYÉ OYÉ @ Le Sample, Bagnolet, France
  • 05.28   Artefacts du Nucléaire @ COSI, Sorbonne, Paris, France
  • 05.03   Fossiles Impossibles @ Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, France
  • 05.02   ~shortwave @ Egregore Radio
  • 04.15   Yet Another Awkward QR Code @ Hacklab01, Zagreb, Croatia
  • 04.08   At Least They Tried @ Hacklab01, Zagreb, Croatia
  • 03.27   Artefacts du Nucléaire @ La Grange, Lausanne, Suisse
  • 01.16   Unikradioshow : Pancake Mix @ Radio Campus
  • 01.01   Glitch Art Semiotics by Michael Betancourt


#all
#performance
#conference
#curation
#short film
#print
#workshop
#exhibition
#radio
Musician playing electronic keyboard and person reading from a laptop in a presentation room with text 'Le Labyrinthe' projected on a screen, ambient lighting setting a calm atmosphere.
3310 Labyrinthes

3310 Labyrinthes is a performed talk on the subject of labyrinths as technology in the company of composer and guitarist Luci. Together we take a structural look at labyrinths from antiquity to the present day.

Considering that each labyrinth is really just a set of folds, we invite the audience to unfold any labyrinth in the manner of an origami that we'd like to make, unmake and re-do. From mythical labyrinths like that of the Minotaur, to modern labyrinths such as IKEA or the algorithmic mazes of YouTube. The performance questions our relationship to wandering, revealing the materiality of the invisible labyrinths that exist all around us.

A person giving a presentation in a dimly lit room, standing to the left and reading from a paper, with an audience seated and facing a screen displaying a large image of a cat with the words "STADE INDICIEL" above it.
Affective Artifacts

If we feel a certain nostalgia towards the crackle of a vynil or to the granular quality of images taken with a film camera, it is because these marks take us back to another era. These grains, these indices, these media markers, are what I like to call affective artifacts, and can inhabit any medium.

Though today, within the context of digital media, these artifacts are treated quite differently as markers of low quality, of bad resolution, of destructive compression. Those that we adorned in the past, we reject in the present. As if our sense of aesthetic was guided by the ideal of a noise-less image, whose standards has been set by techno-enthusiast digital media enterprise and fantasies of hyperrealism.

Blue \x80

The color blue has made its way to our digital lives along with new symbolism and conventions. As citizens of the internet today, we navigate together through its many nuances, surfing the web's ubiquitous blue social media platform designs : twitter, facebook, tumblr,.. But what happens when these neutral and soothing blue cannot be displayed ?


Only then do we get greeted with the most saturated blue of all. Blue /x80 is the max() quantity of hexadecimal blue. It can be seen when you loosely plug an HDMI, it's the color of the unstyled web, such as wikipedia links, and also that of the iconic blue screen of death (BSOD). Blue represents a default setting, a fallback option when all other blues fail.

Cloud Factory

It starts in a windowless room filled with blue sky. A temporary space where files come to die. Suddenly, a disturbance ¿¿¿¿¿¿̳̳̳̳¿̵̵̵̵̛̛̛̛̛̛¿͉͉͉͉͉͉͉͉͉͉˸˸̵̵̵̵̵̵̵̵̵̵˸˸˸̜̜̜̜̜̜̜̜̜̜̜̜¿¿̢̢̢̢̢¿ʴʴʴʴʴͯͯͯͯͯͯͯͯͯͯʴ̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸▓͝͝͝͝͝͝͝͝͝͝͝͝▒╜←∙∕∕∕∕ Is it a glitch ? the factory quickly processes it. Each mishap is reshaped into a cloud of broken data. Artifacts rise and fall as the storm builds up. But how much failure can the system uphold ?

Snapshot from an experimental glitch video featuring a train station with impressionistic purple glitches creating an abstract, painterly effect.
Dérive

8am - Station : Créteil l'Echat. Two trains cross and hoot, a message goes to answering machine, you hear a horn, and a construction crew on a building site which you wonder if it'll still be there tomorrow. People tend to forget themselves in these places, not on purpose, not by accident, it just all happens in the rush. But what if you could stop for a moment and see all that there is which can't be seen. Those radio signals, telephones, 4G, thousands of messenger carriages passing smoothly through you at miles an hour.

Silhouette of a Chinese pole artist performing a dynamic pose against a monochrome blue background.
Étant Données

Étant Données is a short play adapted on stage with the help of Matthias Tempete a chinese pole artist. It features The play tells the story of two orphan brothers born in a extremely digital world in search of the machine that gave birth to them. As they embark on their journey, they decide to follow by boat the trace of the internet cable which lays at the bottom of the ocean. The story is marked by its surreal view of the dystopian genre and its absurd situations that come from making impossible analogies between physical and digital situations.

A visual artist performs in near darkness, their face concealed by a hooded sweatshirt. In the background, a vibrant display of analog glitch art with undulating patterns and electric blue streaks illuminates the scene.
/fu:bar/

/’fu:bar/ is a yearly festival gathering focused on electronic error-themed reinterpretative multimedia art. The week-long festival starts on the first Saturday of October and hosts an artist residency program, showcases diverse talks, workshops, performances and an inclusive group exhibition, set up at multiple locations in Zagreb, Croatia and online.

An impressionistic-style image with vibrant, datamoshed effects that distort the original content, resembling a painting with abstract forms and colors. The scene is suggestive of a garden with figures that blend into the lush, glitched environment.
Impressions Numériques

Today's digital signatures, such as compression artefacts, are seen as faults. The race to new and better video codecs avoiding visually lossy content is raging through a commercial enterprise of standards. The development of an impressionist glitch art form is a reaction to the constant evolution of these codecs, aiming to draw attention towards obfuscated information of failure through the destruction of detail found in artefact beauty. Challenging these complex algorithms using their flaws is a way for these artists to free the pixels from their half-life; giving them sense as malleable entities.

Group of people attending a glitch art workshop, with individuals smiling and interacting around laptops displaying colorful glitched images, in a room with text projections on the wall.
JPEG Crush

As social media platforms endlessly host and compress pictures of ourselves and our memories, it is in our interest to understand how these platforms treat our images. For the time of a workshop (roughly 40 minutes) we learn about how facebook compresses images, the politics of image compression, and finally how to make glitch art using the JPEG compression algorithm against itself.

A black and white photo of a protest where participants are holding oversized onions on sticks above their heads. The surreal scene is crowded with demonstrators in a city street, creating an uncanny and striking visual.
Onions Are Definitively Tears

Onion Is Definitely Tears, is an experimental film about the vegetable itself. It connects various stories collected via smartphone voice messages from people around the world who have left, or seen people leave their home countries. Each individual shares their personal connection to the vegetable, often recounting childhood memories or using its layers as a metaphor to describe earnest emotions. Far from delving away into profound metaphors, the story rather chooses to peer through the onion’s many fascinating cultural representations. From its complex family dynamics to its nuances within pop culture, the narration navigates a set of surfaces and effects, tied together by thousands of years of heritage.

A delicate, translucent fabric artwork is suspended in the air, creating a sense of weightlessness. The fabric casts shadows on the wall behind.
Quelques Formes Discrètes

Every domain has its elementary forms, biology believes cells are the unit of life, physics has particles, Legoworld has the lego block and so on. For this solo exhibition I explored a few discreet shapes that are currently hot topics of our digital infrastructures. As such we delve deep into what is a digital image, how it is seen by humans, by computer systems, and by artificial intelligence. Through a series of artworks I try to give different perspective and point out the inherent biases from within each system.

Digital artwork featuring a central black square with a white, sketch-like drawing of an eye, set against a background with a colorful, glitch-like pattern resembling a distorted digital screen.
rejecting insctruction

rejecting instruction is a remix of Eames Office’s “A Computer Glossary”, an educational short film that was shown for the first time in 1968 at the IBM Corporation’s Hemisfair pavilion. The film is characteristic of the 70s approach to computer science: using oversimplified metaphors and dated american clichés.

We feel this source material is overdue for parody and reexamination. As glitch artists, we scoff at well structured algorithmics, disguised information & behaviorism induction, we would like to remind the world that computer science is not exact, but that it is a playground of malfunctions and emotions that even cold steel hearted machines can hold and share with human beings.

VJ wearing a winter hat adjusting equipment with abstract purple and blue visuals projected in the background, highlighting a creative performance atmosphere
Shades of Blue

Shades of Blue is an a/v live written in collaboration with pianist Fabrizio Rat. In this live, Fabrizio leaves the techno and rigorous rhythms of his first albums behind, in order to experiment with repetition and phase cycles from a new melodic angle” (Friction Magazine) with a so-called ​“prepared” piano that produces altered sounds.

Together we jam on stage like musicians would with each other, but whilst Fabrizio plays the piano, I, exclusively play visuals on a wide screen behind the both us. The theme of Fabrizio's eponym album being the ocean, we both play with repetitions and romantic fleeting structures, both visually and musically.

A blurred picture of a bar as seen in Google Street View overlaid with shortwave transmission radio antenna schematics.
~shortwave

~shortwave is a radio show that combines discussions and DJ sets. The conversations are carried out informally, overlaid with a selection of music.

While the show features both spoken word and music, it always takes place in an intimate acoustic context, giving listeners the impression of being there with us at the local bar, in a living room over tea, at the back of a club or in the courtyard of a building.

A photogrammetry image depicts a street in Berlin, characterized by a fluid and distorted architectural landscape. The buildings appear to melt into the street, creating a surreal urban scene, with the evening light casting soft shadows and giving depth to the city's altered textures.
Touché

During these last few months of confinement, I often thought of the days after the eruption of the Vesuvius. I kept picturing ​​this world where everything is fixed in place. I wondered if Pompeii's lovers still loved each other, and in a sense I think they do, buried into each other's arms, I don't think it's the kind of love that expires.

I spent a lot of time on google maps, explored places I never imagined going, located houses of my childhood, and even had romantic zoom dates where we'd wander Google's streets simultaneously. I noticed that there were many more similarities than I imagined between the physical world and the internet. That there exists virtual geographic spaces that people meet in, and others that are abandoned remnants of the 90s internet. I discovered online concerts, people streaming, and people watching people streaming. And it was fun.