Flight Plan
p. 94-104
Texte intégral
1The use of indexing in much of the work created by SLIDERS_lab as well as its reflections on the notion of perspective both originate in the desire to think up new ways of writing and storytelling. But not just any storytelling! Indeed, interactive stories plunge viewers directly into a network of relationships in which they are asked to follow their personal associations of ideas and ultimately to construct the narrative. The point isn’t to create a story with a beginning, a middle, and end in the classical sense, but to suggest possible connections to viewers who will then fill in the gaps created between pictures with their own “memory-images.” The blanks, empty spaces, or lacunae left between visual, sound, and textual elements are essential to this shared mechanism of creation wherein the notion of “interactivity” comes to be understood in terms of intertextuality. Victory Burgin1 explains that these types of projects call on participants themselves to become a process through which the work takes place.
2With the arrival of personal computers in the early 1990s, the indexing or modelling of lists stimulated intertextual practices and propelled new investigations in art. It allowed us to perceive and try to understand the shift from graphic reason2 to computational reason,3 as well as the emergence of a new episteme (to use a Foucauldian term). The present text intends to trace this trajectory, focusing on the question of narration.
3Producing an interactive narrative requires one to devise delinearized storylines that are free of the diachronic structure typical of linear writing, which is explicitly causal.4 The elements brought together to create them are thus treated as database items to be arranged in space.
Jean-Marie Dallet, Galaxie no. 3, 1993. Photography installation.

© Jean-Marie Dallet
4Such is the case with the physical space of the gallery walls in the photographic ensembles of État du lieu, created by Jean-Marie Dallet in the early 1990s, as well as with the cybernetic space of digital information displayed on screens or video-projected in Voyages no. 17, Voyages no. 3, Histoires de…, Île de Batz, SLIDERS,5 etc. In other words, drawing on Vilém Flusser’s analyses in his book La Civilisation des médias [Medienkultur in the German original], we endeavored to order significations not based on linear codes that generate “universes of processes,” but on two-dimensional codes (surfaces) to which “universes of scenes” have historically been connected.6 In our work, the synchronic composition of databases thus wins out over their diachronic development, forms of spatial arrangement prevailing over those of temporal arrangement,7 following the example of mnemonics, which recommends storing and structuring memory data according to an architectural plan.
5Jean-Marie Dallet had already shown in Dioptrique no. IV8 that vision is a construct and perspective a symbolic form. This idea, which we have always taken to heart, encouraged us some ten years later to envisage the organization and design of databases, in the age of society’s digitization, as opening up a new relational perspective unfolding in space and time. These particular objects of interconnection invented within the cybernetic universe are what Jean-Marie Dallet, along with Jean-Louis Boissier, in the early 2000s, called interactivity.9
6Interactivity allows one to give form to, or even literally to model, relations in virtual space. This reflection on the design of databases is physically embodied in our work on grids and their permutations. To summarize what has already been described elsewhere,10 the grid was primarily used because it was flat and because images could be arranged on it within an evenly distributed x and y coordinate frame. The data of which it is composed are either static, in the case of walls of photographs, or interchangeable, in the interactive works Voyages no. 17 and Voyages no. 3.
Jean-Marie Dallet, Voyages no. 17, 1994. Interactive audiovisual installation. Screenshot.

7 The matrix of four elements required for writing the scenarios would later be replaced by a matrix of four columns and four rows in Île de Batz, in other words, by a grid in which sixteen videos were distributed. As Sylvain Auroux has shown, one of the properties of the data tables (a grid is a table) is to enable delinearized reading through the construction of a third dimension: volume.11 This property was highlighted in Île de Batz by placing four grids with sixteen elements one above the other, thus creating four moments that justified associations between different levels of the story. Taken together, the connections produce a distinct structure, a cube, on which four two-dimensional spaces are arranged along a time axis, creating an architecture that performs the bipolarity of the synchronic-diachronic pair. The narrative also plays with this schema of relationships: when viewers watch a video, they break through the surface of a grid at a specific point and end up during the next viewing at the point on the grid below. The scenario slowly fragments space and time and, by doing so, disorients users, who gradually lose themselves in the “temporal layers” of the story.
8This shifting architecture remained, however, strongly influenced by the constructive typology of the apartment buildings Théo Van Doesburg designed in his study La Cité de circulation (1924-1929), that is, a main body suspended from four pillars that allow for vertical movement and access to available platforms. Île de Batz adopted the schema of La Cité de circulation as well as the paradigm of an accessible, open, multi-directional, and decentralized infrastructure. Unfortunately, the model Van Doesburg imagined in the first half of the twentieth century, despite the modernity of the ideas he developed, considered the question of interactions but not that of interactivity. Finally, Jean-Marie Dallet reappropriated the concept of circulating information one last time in IN/OUT,12 in 2002-2003, before seeking out a new way to use and organize grids.
Jean-Marie Dallet, IN/OUT, 2002-2003. Interactive sound installation.

© Jean-Marie Dallet
9The nature of the work began to evolve in 2005 with explorations into the possibility of creating a collective interactive cinema. Over the course of SLIDERS_lab’s experimentations with developing an open audiovisual environment, we were gradually led to design grids that would no longer be fixed and rigid planes, but rather grids that would be folded, adaptable, pliable, variable, and in constant movement in virtual space. A grid would thus transform into a toroid, a diabolo, a Dupin cyclide, a DNA double helix, a spiral, a cylinder, etc., shapes that could themselves undergo mutations carried out in real time later on.
SLIDERS_lab (F. Curien, J.-M. Dallet), MIM (Marey Interactive Multimedia, 2010-2011. Interactive archive console.

© J.-M. Dallet/SLIDERS_lab
10In MIM (Marey Interative Multimedia, 2010-2011) or VIM (Vasulka Interactive Multimedia, 2014- 2017), the primary grid is curved like a cylinder and could be described as a table with a line and n columns closed up on itself. This is the wheel that users turn to the right or left to select the documents they want to see. However, we would later add complexity to the wheel concept by connecting navigation throughout the Marey or Vasulka13 archives to two perpendicular cylinders, two rotating mechanisms, whose point of contact is the image chosen by the viewer. In creating this model, we drew inspiration from the art of memory of Ramon Llull (1232-1315), a figure renowned in his time for having introduced movement to the manipulation of memories: concentric turning wheels, each bearing ideas that form new schematic combinations when the wheels are put in motion.14
Jean-Marie Dallet, perpendicular wheels for navigating the MIM database.

© J.-M. Dallet/ SLIDERS_lab
11With VIM, which SLIDERS_lab is currently developing, the general mechanics remain the same as those of MIM. One of the major differences between the two, however, is the stacking of cylinders, which form a tower with each of its basic units bringing up the entirety of documents related to one of the Vasulkas’ works.
SLIDERS_lab (F. Curien, J.-M. Dallet), VIM (Vasulka Interactive Multimedia), 2013-2018. Interactive archive console.

© J.-M. Dallet/SLIDERS_lab
SLIDERS_lab (F. Curien, J.-M. Dallet), Sky Memory Project. Interactive cinema performance, 2011-2013. ESBA TALM, Le Mans, France.

© C. Domino/SLIDERS_lab
12An additional step was taken with SLIDERS_lab projects such as Sky Memory Project, Sky Memory Net, and Sky Memory Project 2,15 in which grid squares display a stream of moving images. The cubic grids bring complex architectures to life, reflect the model of the crystal-image theorized by Gilles Deleuze,16 and remind viewers think of kaleidoscopes multiplying and diffracting the indexical image, like the hall of mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947). The novelty of these projects is that the moving architectures of images exist in virtual space. The systems now have a specific function that corresponds to that of the performers in the performances of Sky Memory Project and Sky Memory Net, for example, or with viewers’ desires in Sky Memory Project 2. In the latter, the body of the viewer matches with a virtual form videoprojected onto a wall that then reacts according to the viewer’s gestures and to the greater or lesser distance of the viewer’s body from the projected form.
13By exploring ways of telling stories in a world dominated by computational reason, through which the operations of writing and reading have themselves been transformed, we have tried to elucidate through our projects how one might envisage an interpretation of the anthropological changes that the gaze has undergone in the contemporary era. The shift in priority from the arts of time to those that structure space; the gradual move from a flat visual universe to a browsable universe of databases; and the metamorphosis of perspective produced by Renaissance painting, a perspective that has now become multimodal with the addition of different semantic dimensions - these are all significant developments that involve both digital information and a new way of thinking that goes beyond art.
14Given that the database is coextensive with the digital society in which we are steeped, it is tempting to consider search algorithms and their scenarios as lenses that allow us multiple, ubiquitous, and moving vedute of a virtual world shaped by architectures of memory. Today, these architectures are like new monuments to a remaking of perception and individual consciousness that must be scrutinized and critiqued.
Notes de bas de page
1 Victor Burgin, “L’hétérotopie cinématographique et le non-cinématographique,” Cinéma, interactivité et société, ed. Jean-Marie Dallet (Louvain: Université de Poitiers/CNRS, 2013), 57-58. The entirety of the present passage is strongly inspired by this important text, near the end of which Burgin details the particular activity that he asks of viewers of his work. I find a striking resonance with my own preoccupations in his remarks.
2 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
3 Bruno Bachimont, “Du texte à l’hypotexte: les parcours de la mémoire documentaire,” in Mémoire de la technique et techniques de la mémoire, eds. Charles Lenay and Véronique Havelange (Ramonville-Saint-Agne: Érès, 1999), 195-225.
4 This causal effect associated with traditional cinema should probably be qualified, for, according to Lev Manovich, traditional cinema already lies at the intersection between narrative and database: “We can think of all the material accumulated during shooting forming a database, especially since the shooting schedule usually does not follow the narrative of the film but is determined by production logistics. During editing the editor constructs a film narrative out of this database, creating a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films which could have been constructed. From this perspective, every filmmaker engages with the database-narrative problem in every film, although only a few have done this self-consciously.” Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 237-238.
5 Voyages no. 17 (1994), Voyages no. 3 (1994), Histoires de… (1996), and Île de Batz (1999) are interactive installations created by Jean-Marie Dallet. SLIDERS, tentative de cinéma interactif collectif [an experiment in collective interactive cinema] was developed by SLIDERS_lab (2005-2008).
6 According to Vilém Flusser, “universes of scenes” come first, originating in the figurative drawings found, for example, on the cave walls of Lascaux and Altamira. “For people programmed by images, time flows through the world the way the eye wanders across the image: it diachronizes, it orders things into positions” ( “The Codified World” in Writings, ed. Andreas Ströhl, trans. Erik Eisel [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004], 38). The subsequent “universes of processes” arise with the revolutionary invention of writing, typified by the linear arrangement of the image into “lines.” The act of reading thus consists of making one’s eyes move along a line. “And the result is a new experience of time, that is, linear time, a stream of unstoppable progress, of dramatic unrepeatability, of framing: in short, history” (ibid., 39). See Vilém Flusser, La Civilisation des médias, trans. Claude Maillard (Paris: Circé, 2006), especially the first two chapters, both written in 1978, “Le monde: un système codifié” (cited above in English translation) and “Nous n’avons plus la foi” (in the German original: “Glaubensverlust” in Medienkultur, ed. Stefan Bollman [Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005]).
7 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).
8 Dioptrique no. IV (1992) is a sculpture that displays a magnifying glass attached to a 100 x 100 cm glass surface. The oversized magnifying glass was a manifesto to abandon a world based on optics and perspective for a different symbolic mode of representation based on information technology and language.
9 One can see how the idea of interactivity evolves in the following works: Jean-Marie Dallet, La Notion de figure dans les arts interactifs, 2001, Université Paris 8 Saint-Denis, PhD dissertation; Jean-Louis Boissier, La relation comme forme. L’interactivité en art (Geneva: MAMCO, 2004 and 2009); Anne Cauquelin, Fréquenter les incorporels. Contribution à une théorie de l’art contemporain (Paris: PUF, 2006).
10 A study of these permutations is presented in Jean-Marie Dallet’s essay, “Dispositifs projectifs et arpentage de la mémoire,” in DIGITAL STORIES. Images interactives & Interactions collectives, ed. Jean-Paul Fourmentraux (Paris: Hermann, 2016), 151-169.
11 “Tables use the natural two-dimensionality of planar space. The linear series spatialized by writing allow you to construct two-dimensionality in a different way: the list is before your eyes, you can skim it, skip over elements, count them, number them, etc. This is possible because you are no longer in the linearity of the list, located at one of its points, as you are when you read. In other words, you are still using two dimensions, one of the two natural dimensions of planar space (writing can be horizontal or vertical), as well as the third dimension, volume.” Sylvain Auroux, La Révolution technologique de la grammatisation (Brussels: Mardaga, 1994), 52.
12 Jean-Marie Dallet, IN/OUT, interactive sound sculpture, 2002-2003. Dallet describes the installation and the interactive shapes that it makes possible in “Tête de lecture,” in Dispositifs artistiques et interactions situées, ed. Bernard Guelton (Rennes: P.U.R., 2016), 93-111.
13 Étienne-Jules Marey, the inventor of chronophotography and the chronophotographic gun, is, along with Muybridge, considered a precursor of cinema. Steina and Woody Vasulka, pioneers of video art, have explored the nature of the electronic image and sound since the 1970s.
14 The sketch depicting how Ramon Llull’s wheels function is no longer static but set in movement, as we see in the drawings of his Ars Brevis, in which he introduces the famous ars combinatoria. As for the static model of memory, it remains linked to the classical mnemonic mechanism wherein immobile groups of images are arranged in memory architectures.
15 Sky Memory Project (2011) and Sky Memory Net (2015) are audiovisual-performance devices; Sky Memory Project 2 (2015) is an interactive audiovisual installation.
16 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
Auteurs
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Frédéric Curien
SLIDERS_lab
Composer and sound artist who teaches at the École européenne supérieure de l’image EESI. His research is at the crossroads of music and the visual arts, focusing on the aesthetics of interactive sound and musical spaces in contemporary art. He explores composition environments and sound synthesis and produces music for films, concerts, and live performances. He is the co-director of the artist collective SLIDERS_lab, which is associated with an art research program sponsored by the French Ministry of Culture (MCC/CNRS, 2016-2020). His work has been shown in museums and contemporary art centers in France and abroad. His theoretical work, which examines the aesthetics and archeology of new media, has been published in Europe, Canada, and the US: “Le son porteur d’espaces u-topiques”; “The Instrumental Space”; “Donner forme aux mémoires”; “SLIDERS, a Collective Experience of Interactive Cinema,” and more. -
Jean-Marie Dallet
SLIDERS_lab
Artist, theorist, and curator, as well as Associate Professor at Université Paris 8 Vincennes and a researcher in the research lab AIAC (EU 4010). His theoretical and artistic work examines the fundamental issues and key figures of interactivity (La Notion de figures dans les arts interactifs, Université Paris 8, 2001), placing technology and its critique at the heart of his aesthetic and intellectual interests (Labex Arts-H2H, program “Architectures de mémoire,” 2013-2016). He has supervised the production of the CD-ROM La Troisième Biennale de Lyon (RMN, 1995) and recently served as editor to the book Cinéma, interactivité et société (CNRS & Université de Poitiers, 2013), which contextualizes new forms of the movement-image within broader technological and societal changes. In January 2019, he was the curator of the exhibition “Living Memories,” which focuses on early video art by observing how experimentations by pioneers of the form still nourish present-day artists, sometimes unwittingly.
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