Description
In spite of numerous organizational difficulties linked to the Covid epidemic, the artist Guillaume Bertrand initiated the high school students of the CFAA Valdoie and the Bisontinental students of the Lycée Pasteur, the EREA Simone Veil and the CFA Hilaire de Chardonnet to several digital and interactive workshops, which took place between 2020 and 2021.
This project is a mise en abyme, with an object that sucks everything through it: time, attention, space, words, sounds and images, knowledge, travel. To push to the absurd the use of the smartphone in public spaces, Guillaume and the students set up a project where the phone is omnipresent, they used it to the maximum at each stage. Nevertheless, in order to regain some control over technology, they chose to make a fake phone themselves, using very simple electronic components.
Infinite loop is something that never ends, it’s people immersed in their small mobile screen and going in circles devouring content. It is also a computer process that leads to computer crashes. And it’s also the address of Apple’s headquarters, where the first accessible smartphone arrived.
Action
These workshops were conducted within the framework of the “Artistes plasticiens au lycée” program proposed by the Burgundy-Franche-Comté Region. Through this program – and with the partnership of the DRAC and the DRAAF – the Regional Council of Franche-Comté aims to arouse the curiosity and encourage the initiatives of high school students by meeting artists and discovering places of creation and artistic dissemination.
Three approaches are approached during the residency: the encounter with a work through the discovery of a creative process, the artistic and cultural practice and the construction of an aesthetic judgment. Having begun with a visit to Bien Urbain, the objective is to bring the students to discover the field of urban arts, as much through sensitivity as through practice.
Biography
A hacker and digital artist, a fablab pillar and a pedagogue, a lover of crossovers, of collaboration between artists and autists, between researchers and authors, between image and space and public, Guillaume Bertrand is a kind of digital multi-instrumentalist. It is in order to cross new skills, to collaborate with others and to work on new projects, that he co-founded at the end of 2012, the hacklab 3615 Señor in Besançon, in the spirit of open-source communities and free software.
Photos credits
Johanna Romary