Lives and works in Paris, France. carolannbraun.art [email protected]
My medium is intermedia, shaped by digital tools I’ve explored since the 1980s in various contexts — on my laptop, in my studio, in association with universities, companies and fablabs. Over the years, colleagues, researchers, and programmers have helped me create, theorize and present my work.
I started painting in the 70s, with Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Joel Shapiro and Joan Snyder, faculty and visiting artists at Princeton University. In graduate school at Cornell University, I assisted Eleanore Mikus, Arnold Singer and Patrick Webb. Knox Martin was also a mentor. I carry with me indelible influences — Lissitzky, Grosz, Tauber-Arp, Gorky, among others — reinforced by my first job in the Modern Paintings Department at Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York.
Poetry and specifically combinatory texts have been essential to my research in the visual arts. The first gallery-sized installation was structured around a poem in four voices entitled “Gravity Waves” by Blake Leland ; lines of text were transcribed onto paper strips and woven through a grid of xeroxed motifs by photographer David Bett. My day job at NYU’s Stern School of Management’s Computer Center (thank you Ranga Setlur) introduced me to coding, plotters, SPSSX and networked communication. Evenings after work, I’d head to Interactive Picture Systems (thank you Guy Nouri) and created digital montages from scanned monoprints.
When I moved to Paris in the early 1990s, I worked for Luc Salvaire (Aedificare) doing photo-montages and animations. Early mornings I’d continue with the art work, using equipment at Navigator, one of France’s first multimedia companies (thank you Laurent Sauerwein). I also co-authored an interactive version of Raymond Queneau’s “Un Conte A Votre Façon”, published by Gallimard in Antoine Denize’s Machines à Ecrire (1994).
This led to the Atelier ART3000 (now known as Le CUBE) where I created my first virtual installations with the help of a team of programmers headed by Florent Aziosmanoff.
In parallel, I began working with networked media. In 1999, I was invited by Annie Gentès, professor at what is now known as Telecom ParisTech, to work on networked communication. We teamed up young engineers and continuing education students at the Ecole Multimédia to develop an augmented chat space entitled City Paradigms (shown at ISEA 2000 in Paris and at the MILIA in Cannes). A second prototype, Sandscript, was funded by the Fondation Louis LePrince Ringuet. This experimental work included an art-residency in 2001 at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Troyes. With technology developed by the Timsoft company (thank you Hervé Serres and Antoine Sartoretti) I designed the web site La Preuve Par Troyes, an augmented conversational and literary space meant to engage citizens in the history of their city.
This was a turning point in my career. I became more politically and socially engaged. In 2002, our citizen’s association, Concert-Urbain, began to test prototypes “in the field”. This in turn led to grant-writing, team building and a (better) understanding of the dynamics of French civil society. We created several on-line collaborative spaces (now out of date): www.tour-a-tour.org (2005), a neighborhood website; www.dring13.org (2007), a mobile phone based site for young adults to discuss discrimination ; a polling platform on the subject of happiness, lebonheurbrutcollectif.org (2013-2017). The accompanying Back Office qualified Concert-Urbain for the finals of France’s “e-democracy trophy” (see www.blog-territorial.com/m/article-56982531.html).
Since 2019, the Conseil Citoyen Paris 75013 has picked up where we left off. I’m part of their team but no longer at the helm. We are working on a travelling media platform that records, stores and analyzes stories collected in Paris’ low income neighborhoods. For more information on this citizen’s initiative called “La Station C” go to : lastationc.org.
My horizon today is a mix of all of the above. I have plunged into the ramifications of generative art, thanks to a collaboration with Alain Longuet. Under the pseudonym B_LONG we have produced several works shown at the Abstract Project Gallery and Salon Réalités Nouvelles, among other venues. I re-work still and video occurrences of these generative pieces in an attempt to imagine new environments for interactive animations. A.I. is “here” for us (thank you AAA_Seed and its author, Maa Berriet).
We’re looking forward to the future!
See below for more details.
M.A. / DEA, Institut d’Etudes Théâtrales, Paris III, Paris, France (2003). High Honors.
M.F.A. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA (1982). John Hartell Prize, CCPA Grant with Blake Leland and David Bett.