• Note of intent :
  (written in August 2019, at the very beginning of the project)

A piece of nature, a telephone. An impossible, unnatural dialogue. Unless we denaturalize nature and naturalize the telephone in a common world. Include both in the same graphic stratum, opening up a visual space where the genetic code of one has everything to do with the genetic code of the other. And to find a visual way of revealing this underlying uniqueness.

The subject : a switched-off cell phone in a natural spot on the beach or in the mountains.

This common world is that of virtual space, where everything that enters the eye of the camera, by multiplying shots around the subject, is compared and triangulated to define a cloud of points. This cloud is a table in which the coordinates of each point are stored, 3 by point in a 3D world (position in width, height and depth). Sometimes, certain information that produces inconsistent results is dropped by the program in charge of the reconstruction job, creating an algorithmic interpretation of the subject. The result is a 3-dimensional image on a computer screen, where phone and nature are stored in the same array of points in space.

From there, I wrote a program that selects certain points on the board and draws the telephone in real time, as it goes along. But the program disrupts this drawing.

Instead of going from one point to another and tracing this path on the screen in real time, it is diverted to the next point before it can reach the previous one.

At the end of this process (the model is subdivided into five sections, revealing five drawings in progress simultaneously), the 3D model gradually takes shape as an overlay. A dialogue between the telephone in nature and the incomplete drawing seems to emerge.

Suddenly, however, the drawing is abandoned for a new one, which gradually makes the time appear on the screen. The phone does a simple thing that cell phones know how to do : tell the time.

And in the end, the telephone’s digital operation has everything to do with the device imagined, and nature finds itself « unrealized » because it is so incompatible with it.

Here I’ve written an epilogue to this note of intent, once the project has been completed and presented at an exhibition in Sète : Epilogue