IMAGE Lab (ex-PIIMS)

PRATICE

 

Inspired by electronic music creation methods such as sampling, mixing and spatialized sound design, the IMAGE Lab – ex-PIIMS / Petite Industrie de l’IMage Sensorielle – creates pictorial compositions from thousands of photographs taken by RBW in cities around the world, as abstract(ed) samples of reality.

These off-ground architectures of images take the form of photographic collages and installations (sometime immersive), digital photomontages and animations, interactive devices and protocols, or text-image experiments (stories, theory-fiction or essays). See images below.

RESEARCH INTENTIONS

 

Shaping a kind of living world (a Republic?) of images, oscillating between order and chaos, this lab reflects since the late 90’s, the expansion of the data-sphere (data-deluge), the rise of the digital era (cognitive capitalism, Web 1, 2 and 3, AI, metaverses, etc.), and digital humanities.

 

Over the course of its numerous artistic experiments, the lab has also addressed critical topics such as the value of images, urban complexity, transformation and imaginaries, or the post-truth paradigm, which blurs the boundary between reality and fiction.

ACTION SHOOTING 

 

Since 2015, the lab has been experimenting photographic performance workshops in the public space (called action shooting) following a variety of protocols, and in which the camera or smartphone becomes an active protagonist in the sequence.

The photographic intention is distorted (or even abandoned), and the front and back of the camera intermingle.

 

Beyond the artistic innovation at the crossroads of photography and performance, the sessions foster a reflexion on the attention ecology and the making of individual, collective and urban identities.

FOR THE IDEA Lab

 

The IMAGE Lab also feeds into the IDEA Lab / LIID research. 

See, for example, the diagrams “Speculation on Image-Value”, which models a methodology for valuing images, “Urban Pictorial Theme”, which guides an examination the city through images, or the Paris Galaxies lab on the future of Greater Paris, inspired (a posteriori) by the photo installation “Poetico-speculative Bubble” (2001).

The IMAGE Lab also curates and composes with images from the web, whether to analyze emerging trends or to give a sense of future hypotheses, scenarios, or worlds. See the Mesopolis and Toward Alien Cosmologies labs.