To mark World Creativity and Innovation Day, we interviewed Studio Artera artist Romain Lalire to talk tech, art and poetry.
He exhibited at Palais Tokyo in 2018 and has designed a performance for the House of Cartier in Shanghai in 2019. He works regularly with major French and international luxury houses.
It's about drawing inspiration from technologies, playing with these concepts and confronting them with other worlds to bring an offbeat, innovative perspective to a subject. It means looking further afield, elsewhere and differently.
I've always had a real passion for new technologies, but above all a deep desire to create the impossible. As the writer Arthur C. Clarke once said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". And I particularly like this quote, because it expresses what I want to say to the audience.
To constantly surprise and push back the boundaries between the virtual and the real, I have to keep a constant watch on the latest uses and releases. I also believe that mastering these technological codes allows us to play with them, to hijack them and invent new forms of artistic expression.
I like to play with pixels, shake them up, transform them to share a part of my universe, so I'd say it's video. Especially when it becomes interactive and allows the viewer to control it.
We're about to enter a period that is both fascinating and complex, with the arrival of quantum computers on the one hand, which will turn the tech world upside down, and digital art increasingly taking its place in the artistic landscape. On the other, we're facing a major raw materials crisis as a result of the health crisis, but also a limited supply of these essential components for the technology industry.
In a few years, screens will probably be dematerialized and we'll be in permeable realities, where we'll go from the real to the virtual in a second, notably with screens on glasses or contact lenses.
But in my opinion, there will also be a very strong attraction to the "real", the "true", with a desire to cut ourselves off from this omnipresent technology to rediscover materiality.
Video credits: "Double Je" by Romain Lalire
Concept +Direction: Romain Lalire
Text and voice-over: Guillaume Barbot
Robots and lights: Collectif Scale
Choreography and performance: Julien Gaillac
Real-time video: Alexandre Le Guillou
Interactive integration: Colin Chibois
Music and sound effects: Ena Eno
Leviwinch: Olivier Merlet
Video : Simon Gillouin
Photography : Flora Mathieu
To discover the world of this extraordinary artist, visit wwww.romainlalire.com
