PhD : Uqam/Le_Fresnoy

Resume :

Today, more than ever, the issues linked to recording techniques are at the heart of political challenges (safeguarding and sharing heritage), societal questions (personal virtual collections) and cultural issues (wide circulation of information). These issues, however, go far beyond the realm of conservation, and have a direct influence on creative fields. While recorders in their digital form have already had a major impact on fields such as music and image processing, for the purposes of this thesis I’m focusing on those that are having an impact on sculptural practices: three-dimensional recorders. They are seen as disruptive technologies, triggering a shift of sculpture into a post-digital phase. This subject is directly inspired by a problem encountered in my practice; in 2015, I discovered these devices, which at first seemed to respond to as yet unattainable sculptural desires, then quickly and paradoxically, I was no longer sure, when using them, that I was succeeding in making « sculpture ». As much as the excitement provoked by these tools, this doubt and discomfort are at the origin of this research-creation thesis and found their most telling plastic manifestation in a work produced in parallel with this writing project: Blind Sculpture.

To do so, I had to return to the ontology of sculpture itself, and finally, through analysis of the works in which they are used, propose a model capable of describing the complexity of the realities involved, based on the classical representational paradigm. 

The study of these tools has thus led to their characterization, which, observed from the point of view of sculpture and as an extension of proprioception, has also enabled me to propose a rereading of the singularities offered by extended reality, or to underline the acute awareness that the artists cited have of the apparatus and devices they use, as well as their ability to play with them to create in viewers a set of « strangenesses » at the service of the artistic experience.

Finally, it should be noted that this writing work borrows from various fields, including philosophy, entrepreneurial studies, psychology, art history and systems analysis. It is mainly based on the analysis of 10 works, including Blind Sculpture. A small number of concepts have been forged as tools for reflection: the AME (Appareil Mediatic Euclidien – Euclidien Mediatic Apparatus), the Metareferent, the Impresentation, the CRÉ (Cycle Représentational Élargie – Enlarged Representational Cycle) and the Continuum of Extended Reality.

If this work were to define the type of experience offered by the pieces using these devices, it would be in these terms: they are sculptural experiences, which enable the setting up of conditions of artistic derealization thanks to the mobilization of several realities, and which offer artists the possibility of engaging in the creation of sculptural scenarios, and in particular sensory scenarios.

Keywords :     three-dimensional digital recorders, sculpture, postdigital, representation, proprioception, extended reality, derealization, sensorial scenarios.