Pierre Giner is an artist, an acrobat of new technologies and digital art who has got into the habit of having fun in unclassifiable creations. At the Palais Augmenté, an avant-garde festival of digital art at the Palais Éphémère in Paris, the master of artistic discrepancy presents “I-Dance”, an installation that will soon have the avatars of five thousand young people dancing together. Maintenance.
RFI : What is the purpose ofI-Dance ?
Pierre Giner : It’s to make everyone dance. Make a very embodied digital work. Each with their own body. It’s being able to dance like a contemporary choreographer. It’s something very festive, quite weird, but I like it, being weird. It’s like old new media. Like cinema at the beginning, see yourself dancing with your own body. Me, I love this pleasure of images.
What was the technological challenge of your work ?
In fact, it’s a fairly old work that keeps mutating. It is linked to the question of the grace of bodies, of the joy of moving, of seeing oneself moving. Originally, the Hyères Festival asked me in 2004 to imagine something to celebrate this international fashion festival around grace and movement. I figured there are no better character designers than fashion designers. So, I had fashion designers’ clothes and characters created and animated in 3D. I found a tech in Korea that fit on my laptop. Afterwards, it became public parties, objects with DJs, images and moving bodies, little by little it became more complex.
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You were born in 1965 in France. As an artist, what is your relationship with new technologies ?
I am very sensitive to new technologies. And in my opinion, artists have to say to themselves: what else can we do with it? The problem with new technologies is that they are industrial. And if we don’t seize it, we leave it to the industry. But, in my opinion, artists should care about new images. I did the 3D scans by hand. I love that. I find it very strange to be able to capture someone’s body in 3D. Then, I worked with the Bonlieu national scene in Annecy, which is very advanced in contemporary dance. We imagined that we would have a kind of popular ball with everyone between us and going everywhere: in colleges, high schools, in other national scenes. For two years, we have captured more than 5,000 bodies! And we’re going to make them dance soon. All together.
So the initial idea dates back to 2004. In the meantime, what has changed for you in your relationship to digital art? ?
What has changed is that everyone uses it. It’s everywhere in our lives. At the beginning, I was geek, today, everyone is “geek”. Everyone has a choice of video games on their laptop. Everyone takes their picture, sends each other messages and ultimately that’s what brings us together… At the time, people used to say to me: ” But what are you doing ? “Before, it was perhaps less “normal” to take care of it. Me, I come from contemporary art and for contemporary art, it’s very strange, it has no value… But for me, it doesn’t matter, if it has no value for some. The value is that it’s part of our lives and I think it needs to be addressed.
I worked for a long time in Japan and China. These things were more obvious there. People naturally used their phones for that. For them, it was more obvious, but the question of art existed much less [rires]. There is a kind of inversion. I don’t know what has changed today, but what must change is that we must be able to do things with all of us. We must be wary of start-ups, major operators, of what we do with our data. And we ourselves should be creative with our data. I think that’s what’s important.
In your work I-Dance, it is obvious that the place of the spectator changes, because he is no longer condemned to just watching, but he is invited to dance himself to the choreographies of very famous choreographers. But what changes for choreographers like Amala Dianor, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Abou Lagraa, Rachid Ouramdane, Gisèle Vienne or Boris Charmatz when they begin to create choreography in the service of digital art and which will be performed by the avatar of Mr. and Mrs. Everybody ?
Digital brings us together. It is often said that digital separates us, but in reality, digital brings us together – when we know how to use it. A dancer with his dance, the musician with his music, digital art is like a stage, since we all have data to share. And if we start crossing them, we can create new objects. It’s like a real scene. I create dollhouses, real virtual stages on which real people dance, even if it’s only their image… They dance real dances, for example by Boris Charmatz, to the real music of Salut, it’s cool. And the combination of these different materials produces something else.
What changes for Boris? For example, that he is not quite at the origin, he is rather in the idea of sharing and that we cross things together. Me, I’ve been doing things in this area for a long time. I first worked with the choreographer Christian Rizzo. At the time, I took him to Seoul, with great trepidation, to produce a play together. I was afraid that he would think it was nonsense. And it’s true: it’s nonsense in the sense that we don’t really know what it is. We cannot say exactly what is happening… What is happening is not yet “normal”. And I think that’s inspiring. I myself do this to astonish myself. Either way, I can’t control it. When 5,000 people get scanned, when I myself have to play with these 5,000 people, it’s too big for me not to think that I’m going to be surprised.
In a way you extend the story of the image ?
Yes, that’s the story of the picture. The increase in formats, the speed of reading, the multiplication and complexity of images, the training of the spectator, all this is a story of images that has always been a story of getting out of control, of letting oneself be surprised. And this exhibition is the occasion of astonishment, of a new curiosity.
What surprised you the most in relation to the reactions of the spectators, or rather the participants of your project? I-Dance ?
It’s a very direct relationship between people and their own image. There is this joy of seeing yourself and playing with your own image. And there is also this relationship with others: dancing with a deer, etc., this has a relationship with naivety. There is a kind of candor in relation to the image. There is something very deeply human there. And I think it’s worth the cost to grow it. I’m lucky that people are willing to take part in it, are willing to allow me this letting go, so that I can scan their bodies. They “give” it to me. They let themselves play with what their body could do. It’s important, because we live in a society where, very often, we are afraid of ridicule, of self-image, of what others think of it. There is an increasing pressure in our hyper-developed, hyper-constructed societies, where ridicule constantly awaits us. I-Dance offers this letting go, the possibility of playing with the image of one’s body and even of freeing it. It is this experience that the national Bonlieu scene offers when they go to colleges and high schools to do this with young people. It’s quite liberating and instructive for the people who participate. They see themselves doing something else. If digital is used for that, that would be great [rires].