I really like short films, mostly because too often I'll fall asleep in front of long-length cinema. If you want to grab my attention these days, you either got to be great at storytelling, or make short films. Just like long films, short films usually consists of three key elements : a beginning, an end, and everything inbetween. All three of these elements are bound by time and it is today widely accepted today that films should be watched in a linearly ordered fashion at a speed of exactly one second per second.
For this reason I find short films to be the perfect vessels to synthetize my yearlong researches and obsessions into smaller formats that speak more to humans than they do to computers. On the following page you'll find a selection of projects I've worked on that vary in format from actual short films to music videos and collaborative works. Although what they all have in common is the will to bring back narratives to the digital world.
Synopsis
For the first time, seismograms were able to measure the noise of human activity by its absence.
During these last few months of confinment, 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. During this period, 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.
Touché's video clip tells the story of these intertwined spaces, to these artists who streamed live music from their bedrooms, to these infinite worlds that we explore in video games, to these virtual spaces that we inhabited when the streets of our cities couldn't. The world of Touché was assembled by taking 12,000 screenshots of Google Earth in the cities of Montreuil, Berlin and Bamako in order to model by photogrammetry a universe denuded of humans, an ambiguous place, close to what it was during these two first month of confinment.
Credits
The music video was made for Hyperactive Leslie, "Touché" is one of the tracks of the album Joué released at Airfono Label on 18.06.2021
La Dérive is an urban philosophy term which describes the act of wandering through a place in order to discover it as a network of experiences. It is an approach that consists of moving through the different atmospheres of a space, letting oneself be guided by its impressions.
Synopsis
8am - Station : Créteil l'Echat. Two trains crossed and hooted, 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.
Credits
The text was written by Mélina Despretz, Eliott Lerner and interpreted by Martin Van Eeckhoudt.
The film was designed as a 360° digital installation geolocalised to the station of Créteil l'Echat and accessible in public space. As a laureate of the Numéri-Scope call for projects, it took part in the Génération Express program designed to accompany the construction work on the new subway stations of Paris. It was commissioned by the Société du Grand Paris and implemented by the artistic and cultural department of the Grand Paris Express with the CENTQUATRE-PARIS as producer.
Synopsis
We experience life and evolve through digital spaces that hold less and less meaning to us every day. As we are acting everyday more like them, our quest to understand the machines who encrypt our data has become closer to an identity crisis.
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.
Credits
Брюс Проблеми - Digital Ruins - Dream Doctor - Entropywave - flvz - GenerateMe
György Ulrich - Holographic Thought Process - j3d1n4 - Jo FRGMNT Grys - John Bumstead
Jozes Aquiler - Kaermack Polewska - Kaspar Ravel - M Reinhardt - Monoskop - Prntrror - PulledFrop
Roberto Malano - Samuel Dumez - Suture - v3d.space - vividvivi - XanderofXanadu - music by 自決 9 6
