PLEIX' talk at the ENSAD in Paris

Last week i attended the talk that Eric Augier from the group Pleix gave at the ENSAD, rue d'Ulm in Paris. Here are my notes:

He presented their personal and commercial works. Personal as in "developed by members of the Pleix collective for their own pleasure" and opposed to works commissioned by clients. The later financing the former.

Pleix is a community of digital artists (graphic designers, 3d artists, musicians, etc.) who are now quite famous, yet the personalities behind the works remain very mysterious. They gained recognition and fame very simply: 7 guys met, liked each other's work, founded the graphic art collective in 2001 and uploaded their works (2 or 3 videos at the time) on a website which they define as their "virtual gallery". And that's it. Digital word of mouth did the rest. They define themselves as grafic designers but also as "media and television sponges", they are not trying to denounce the phenomena that they observe but they just identify trends and translate them in a playful way. Sometimes there is a political or ethical message, sometimes it's just an artistic research.

One of their first and probably most iconic project is Beauty Kit, a series of short movies that sarcastically "advertise" shiny beauty kits for little girls. There's one complete with scalpel and anesthetic spray for breast augmentation, another one to allow them to do their own liposuccion or facial reconstruction.

The project started with the discovery of the work of artist Dana Wyse who makes pills embedded with miraculous properties, there's one to "teach yourself german in one hour", another to "understand contemporary art instantly", etc. Pleix liked their playfulness and irony of her universe and offered to make a video for her exhibition. She liked it but felt that it wasn't her style. Pleix kept the work for themselves, uploaded it on their website and it toured the festivals.

The Ferme du Buisson, near Paris, later gave them "carte blanche" to present the work in a particular way: their accompanied the screening of the film with an installation of little prosthesis made of silicone.

In 2004, they created another project especially for the Ferme du Buisson: Netlag. The first step was to develop a custom-built software that grabs on the internet movies from surveillance webcams all around the world (up to 3000 webcams because of the limitations of the program). One frame every 10 minutes was then recorded during a 24-hour span in January 2004. The films were then mapped on a representation of the world, the images were accelerated to give a better feeling of their night/day evolution and the result is pretty impressive: the African continent is nearly invisible while certain European countries and the US appear to be very active because, as we know it, surveillance is pretty well developed there.

What makes the work even more fascinating is that it was conceived before the launch of Google Earth.

The idea attracted the interest of the commercial world. Adidas bought the right to reproduce the concept for a year. They used the money to finance other "personal" projects.

Bleip - Clicks. Two members of the Pleix collective worked on the project. They hardly met each other during the creative process. Each one was working from a remote location, there was just an intense exchange of images and animations. This is actually one of the characteristics of Pleix: they don't have a studio, they work from home. What was at first a constraint (not enough money to rent a studio) became a style of working enabled by the internet and the phone. When they have to work for clients, the productors rents studios for them.

The used many vectorials because there were some constraints of weight at the time (internet not as fast and powerful as it is today). The images show everyday objects: they are mixed, decoded and thus given a new meaning.

Sometimes is inspired by 9/11. Pleix was hypnotized, horrified and fascinated by the images of destruction that appeared on every TV screen at the time. Sometimes is a piece on the aesthetics of destruction, it's also a research on 3D. No political message thus. They used many pictures to make the films (most of them are photographies of La Defense, a famous business district in Paris), then they assembled the images in 3D (using a camera mapping programme that rebuilds volumes). 2 persons worked on it during 2 or 3 months + one musician (Kid 606). Actually getting the music was a painful crusade against producers: the musician was very happy to lend his music, the producers made the whole process very difficult.

In contrast, Cish Cash, a videoclip for Basement Jaxx, was a no-brainer. They answered a call for proposal, they built the images around the music. It was a command from a disc company but they had a lot of freedom.

Plaid - Itsu (my absolute favourite) started with a competition launched by a label of eletronic music. Once again the clip was built around the images. They had no money, they asked friend to play the different roles and looked for budget help around. Techniques: morphing, photo shootings, animated graphics, 3D...

Simone is inspired by the '80s game Simon and plays with colours and sounds, pushing the technology to its limits, commenting on our everyday relationship with computers-

E-Baby started with a reflection on their personal working process: they work from remote locations. Can all relationship be meaningful if they are remote? Including one with a baby? They had a baby model made in latex, shoot images and used morphing to recreate movements between the different positions.

Once again they showed their work at the Ferme du Buisson in a particular setting: people had to enter a small box and lay down to see the movie which was projected on the ceiling. Claustrophobic.

Birds is their latest video: dogs are slowly flying (or rather thrown in the air) to the sound of some '80s style club music composed by Vitalic. They made a casting of dogs to select the best breed and they put them under very bright lights (which humans had problems to stand while the dogs were perfectly ok with it). They used a camera traditionally used to study the rotation of missiles and capable of capturing 200 000 per second.