Antoine SCHMITT
Visual artist, lives and works in Paris, France.
Antoine Schmitt creates artworks in the form of objects, installations and situations to address the processes of movement in all of their modalities, and question their intrinsic conceptual problematics of visual, philosophical or social nature. Heir of kinetic art and cybernetic art, nourished by metaphysical science-fiction, he endlessly interrogates the dynamic interactions between human nature and the nature of reality. Originally programming engineer in human computer relations and artificial intelligence, he places the program, a contemporary artistic material and unique by its active quality, at the core of most of his artworks, to reveal and literally manipulate the forces at stake. With a precise and minimal aesthetics, he raises the question of movement, of its causes and of its forms. Antoine Schmitt, alone or through collaborations, has undertaken an articulation of this approach with more established artistic fields like music, dance, architecture, literature or cinema.
His work has received awards in international festivals and has been exhibited at Pompidou, MAC - Lyon, Ars Electronica - Linz...
He is represented in Paris by the Galerie Charlot.
▶ ACTIVE SITE-SPECIFIC MONUMENTAL INSTALLATION, EPHEMERAL OR PERSISTENT An abstract visual shape endlessly paces on a facade, in relationship to its architectural elements. It slides on the borders, hits the window frames, bounces on the door sides, circulates in the available spaces. It inhabits it. Algorithms of artificial life and physical equations recreate the behavior of an abstract wild feline in a cage : a nervous body, free but confined.
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▶ INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION FOR PUBLIC SPACE White lines live in a large space on the ground. They react to the passers-by, incarnating their near past and future paths. Autonomous and interactive, they play with their movements, anticipating and adapting, confronting them with their own free will. They choose some passers-by at random and get attached to them until they leave the projection zone, following them or preceding them in their movement. They tend to create links between them.
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▶ INSTALLATION CSL is an artwork that makes the radical move of transforming a whole building into the sleep light of the city, akin to the sleep light of a computer. All the lights of the building pulse together : seen from far away, the whole building behaves like a single white light slowly pulsating with an organic rhythm. It can be seen from very far, even from outer-space. This giant sleep light starts when night falls and the city’s activity slows down. It is the sleep light of the city.
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▶ LIVE VIDEO INSTALLATION It is a control tower that does not control anything. We indeed see the direction and speed arrows of the people, but we can only be observers of these free humans who manage their intentions and their movements by themselves within the world and through the crowd. This artwork confronts us directly to the mechanisms of freedom. It is the prolongation of the artist’s research which adresses the autonomous movement, its causes and its shapes.
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▶ INSTALLATION Open visual symphony for the windows of the city. At night, each connected computer illuminates the window of its office, of the home and blinks, pulsates, beats, fades in and out, each according to its own score, but all in rhythm with all the others. It deals with individuality and globally, complexity and organization, order and chaos. The whole city becomes the orchestra : both spectator and interpret of the symphony that is playing. It is a global city experience.
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▶ INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION Re-interpretation of an existing public place through the videoprojection on its architectural elements of a population of extremely dynamic white vectors which they thus inhabit and which incarnate the invisible forces at stake within the structures of the building. Sensitive to humans which pass by, very fluid, dynamic, autonomous, gifted of individual and group behavior, these force vectors proceed by attraction, repulsion, curiosity, boredom, desire, free will...
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▶ ACTIVE SITE-SPECIFIC MONUMENTAL INSTALLATION, EPHEMERAL OR PERSISTENT An abstract visual shape endlessly paces on a facade, in relationship to its architectural elements. It slides on the borders, hits the window frames, bounces on the door sides, circulates in the available spaces. It inhabits it. Algorithms of artificial life and physical equations recreate the behavior of an abstract wild feline in a cage : a nervous body, free but confined.
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▶ LIVE INSTALLATION A live video feed is transformed in real time before being exhibited on a large LCD screen. The Place de la Comédie of Montpellier, France is shifted into a parallel universe: a golden magical world in which colors are perceived differently and where the color gold is predominant. This transposition leads us to reinterpret our way of looking, decomposing our analysis process of forms, movements and intentions. Created for the Thierry Fournier's exhibit "Fenêtre augmentée".
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▶ INSTALLATION FOR A CITY An installation for a city created by Antoine Schmitt, commissioned by Vinci Immobilier Rhône-Alpes Auvergne, for the Fête des Lumières 2011, in Lyon. > For more details, see City Sleep Light.
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