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A photo safari in the land of war
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By Maurice Benayoun - Golden Nica Award in the Interactive Art
category in 1998
a musical creation by Jean-Baptiste Barrière
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Showed for the first time
in September 1997 at the Ars Electronica Centre (Linz, Austria),World
Skin is an interactive artwork conceived by Maurice Benayoun,
developed and produced by Z-A, AEC and SGI. |
| Armed with cameras, we
are making our way through a three-dimensional space, the CAVE
system The landscape before our eyes is scarred by war-demolished
buildings, armed men, tanks and artillery, piles of rubble, the
wounded and the maimed. |
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This arrangement of photographs
and news pictures from different zones and theaters of war depicts
an universe filled with mute violence. The audio reproduces the
sound of a world in which to breathe is to suffer. Special effects?
Hardly. We, the visitors, feel as though our presence could disturb
this chaotic equilibrium, but it is precisely our intervention that
stirs up the pain. We are taking pictures; and here, photography
is a weapon of extinguishing. Each of us can take pictures, capture
a moment in this world wrestling with death. |
| Each photographed fragment
disappears from the screen and is replaced by a white silhouette.
Each exposure is printed out to paper. This is about the status
of the image in our process of getting a grasp on this world : The
world falls victim to the viewer's glance, and everyone is involved
in its disappearance. |
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The interactive soundtrack composed by Jean
Baptiste Barrière is there to enable us to go beyond
the play of images and to experience this immersion as real participation
in the drama : the sound is there to transform progesssivly the
cameras'clic into a machine gun sound. The world is victim of
the The world falls victim to the viewer's glance, and everyone
is involved in its disappearance.
World Skin has been presented at Imagina (February
98) at the Art Show of the Siggraph 98 this summer and at The
Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm in December.
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WORLD
SKIN
by Maurice Benayoun
Music : Jean-Baptiste Barrière
Software : Patrick Bouchaud,
Kimi Bishop (SGI), David Nahon
(Z-A), Gilbert Netzer (AEC)
Graphic preparation : Raphaël Melki Production : Ars Electronica
Center, Z-A Production, Silicon Graphics Europe
With the help of : Golden Nica of the Prix Ars Electronica 98 of
the ORF (Upper Austrian TV Channel )
FutureLab of the Ars Electronica Center, SGI. |
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