Multimedia Installations
The last one is a collaborative piece I'm elaborating with Gaetan Henrioux. The work is a multimedia installation piece, composed by text-videos and digital paintings integrated into geometrical plastic elements. We're building a dystopian city based on the architecture of the panopticon, in which plastic elements shape colorful skyscrapers. We're exploring Foucault's idea as reshaped by the digital era by people such as William Bogard ; that we are somehow heading to a surveillance that would be its own simulation. "Increasingly the technological enlargement of the field of perceptual control, the erasure of distance in the speed of electronic information has pushed surveillance beyond the very limits of speed toward the purest form of anticipation"
Inspired by this, we thought of this transparent and visually attractive city, where people as contributors of their own shared data-bases would see personalized ads catch-phrases (taken from real suggested websites through Facebook etc) and surrealist cityscapes as representing their supposed geolocalizations. The very idea of panopticon is annihilated as a result to new social structures (physical and virtual) where each individual is self-conditioned to share and expose personal informations. In this way, the order imagined to "discipline and punish" becomes ironically the ideal of human interactions.
In the wake of the Moroccan Arab Spring uprising, Yasmine Laraqui re ects on the global allure of mass demonstrations, from protests to rave parties. She questions the extent to which the easthetics of mass gatherings - as experienced in real time and online - have overwhelmed their ostensible aim of social commentary or political revolution.
Bonnie Yochelson
School of Visual Arts - MFA, Photo Video and related media, 2014
Photos installation 16 mini polaroids in plexiglass boxes,
4’x3’x2’ each
This piece is composed by a series of 16 mini polaroids , displayed in plexiglass boxes.
These have their front sides designed as a moucharabieh. The moucharabieh has preserved the intimacy of urban householders in Arabic architectures since the Middle Age. As old medina houses were packed and particularly close one to the other, this structure allowed people to see what was happening in the street without being seen. By adding the changing color led lights and the peepholes in the middle of the moucharabieh as to recall peep shows, the viewer is invited to experience a paradoxical de nition of the structure as he’s led to take a voyeur position to see the photographs through the holes.
The present series deals with Arab women body representations in the cyberspace. The polaroids have been taken from amateur videos of women -whom are most of the time dancing- that have been stollen and diffused on different websites created to criticize and diminish them.
Uphorias -2013 Multimedia installations.
Uphorias is a series of multimedia installations realized in collaboration with the graphic designer Alice Ito.
Inspired by images of cerebral electric activity and MRI studies, we have edited a composition of colored pixel like forms. They are projected together with a set of light effects from stroboscopes and lasers onto the tunnel, from the outside. This arrangement is often used in clubs to increase feelings of immersion in rave participants as well as to create visual effects sequenced to dance movements. Some ravers experience releases of large amounts of serotonin, which increase cere- bral activity and create a sensation of genuine, I quote, “self-discovery”.