I started painting in the 70s, with Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Joel Shapiro and Joan Snyder, teachers 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.
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.
The first gallery-sized installation was structured around a poem in four voices entitled “Gravity Waves” by Blake Leland ; the texts were also transcribed onto color-coded paper strips and woven through a grid of xeroxed motifs by photographer David Bett. In the late-80s I had a stint in animation at the High Tech LED Sign Company in Florida. When I moved to Paris in 1991, I illustrated and animated architectural maquettes for AEDIFICARE.
Poetry and specifically combinatory texts have been essential to my research in the visual arts. I 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 (Chabanaud, Bouchon, Fasquel). Also based on a poem by Blake Leland, Sonnet Sequence combines a dozen words (how, when, if, then, but, since…everything, nothing, changes, happens) into a meditation on freedom and constraint. With Move Don’t Move, I hooked up an animated “painting” to a webcam, exploring the effect of the viewer’s gaze on an evolving composition. In 2010, with GOBO, I worked with a “collective gaze” : when a viewer left the installation everything “seen” by that person would float away too, leaving the composition to be completed by the remaining viewers.
Today, 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. I re-work still and video occurrences of these generative pieces in an attempt to deepen my grasp of composition.
In parallel, I began working with networked media. In 1999, I was a visiting artist at what is now known as Telecom ParisTech. We teamed up young engineers and continuing education students in graphic design 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).
Today, 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.
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.
B.A. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA (1976). Art History, Visual Arts Program.
A.A. Bennett College, Millbrook, NY, USA (1973). Liberal Studies. Valedictorian.
The MICKENS SERIES (2020-2025), digitally produced and repainted large scale collages inspired by generative work.