"Collido_scope" - interactive photographic installation
"umbrellas" ("parapluies")
The Cube is located in the suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, which is situated at the south-western limit of Paris. Issy - and its mayor, André Santini - prides itself as being the first "cybercity" in France. Indeed, it is a municipality that has incorporated many of its administrative functions in its web site. It is allegedly the first commune to have performed a "cyber marriage". The local schools are extremely well equipped with computers.

The Cube was created as a centre for the digital arts. It offers a diversified programme of conferences, exhibitions, and has a lot of studio space where people can work and be trained in new media. However its activities go beyond this, as the Cube offers artists residencies that allows them to research different themes. The Cube was created by the ART3000 association, run by Nils and Florent Aziosmanoff and Stéphanie Fraysse-Ripert. Active in the digital art field in France for over a decade, they have organised a number of conferences on digital art over the years.

The Cube is housed on several floors of a beautiful, modern concrete building, with an airy interior and outside platforms that give the impression of an aerial boat floating above the surrounding quarter.

In 2002 I visited the Cube in order to show them my work on interactive photography, and in late May I was invited to make an installation for the 1er Contact Festival which was to be held from the 16th to the 20 th October. The purpose of the festival was to place digital art in an exterior, urban setting, in specially designed street furniture.

I thus worked on Collido_scope throughout the summer, making several trips to Issy to impregnate myself with the city and its way of being. I decided to concentrate on the centre of the town, around the city hall, where the exhibition was to take place. The work would be exhibited in the place of its creation. I spent a weekend in August taking hundreds of photographs. My limit would be my memory cards - every so often I would have to rush down to the Cube to download my pictures onto CD-ROM.

One of the motifs present in my work, indeed which gives it its title, is a ceramic wall fresco, rather ugly, about 30 to 40 years old. I used this as a backdrop in the principle scene, the image split in two via the reflection of the wall in the facade of the "Monoprix" supermarket that is located perpendicular to it. I thus caught people going in and out of the entrance, along with their reflections. Mixing up the pictures in a random, continuous fade would make the kaleidoscope effect.

In order to take these pictures, I placed my tripod in an entrance way to the supermarket (luckily closed off), with my camera pointing along the surface of the glass. At one point a dapper man exited from the supermarket and asked me if I had permission to take pictures "on his property". I started to explain to him in urbanistical terms that I was in the public realm, on the pavement, but thought it more persuasive to tell him about the festival. Satisfied, he returned inside. Little did I know…

Indeed, the location finally chosen for the work was to be just there, the screen placed in front of the ceramic wall. My installation was to be placed in a "sucker" shaped piece of street furniture - in French called a "sucette", the type that normally contains advertising - but in this case containing a 42 inch plasma screen, a microphone, and a powerful computer.

After that I had to process the pictures through Photoshop and do the programming. At the same time, it was business as usual at Magelis, and I was also working on the Over My Dead Body project. I returned to the Cube a week before the festival to work there in residence. Working day and night, on occasion dropping off on the keyboard of my PowerBook at the hotel. At the Cube I shared rooms with a colleague programming three Sony Aibo dogs to act out "Little Red Ridinghood" for one of the other works, a behavioural piece by Florent Aziosmanoff, the Cube's art director and commissioner of the festival.

One morning, a few days before the festival was to start, the festival producer rushed in to say that workmen were demolishing the fresco! She managed to stop them, leaving the wall defaced. It turned out that the supermarket manager, who is doing serious renovation, had decided to demolish it in order to put up a sign giving directions to his parking lot. Unfortunately, it turned out that the wall belongs to the building next door... so when I suggested that we could save the situation by removing certain tiles to make the demolition look "esthetic", I was informed that this would be impossible, as the wall was now evidence for pending legal action. So finally it was partially covered with white board, and the link between the picture and its surroundings, via the fresco, lost its evident nature. Which goes to show that one of the aspects of urban art should be to take into account its unpredictable, changeable nature. C'est la vie.

After a night of coffee and Aibo barking, I finally got the computer running in my "sucker" the morning the festival started. I had to continue programming on site with Roland Cahen from the Ircam to get the sound running properly, using the keyboard balanced on a supermarket trolly, in the drizzle. The festival consisted of ten installations, very varied (http://www.1ercontact.com). Unfortunately it lasted for only five days, as the cost for guarding them, hiring material, etc., was very high. But the whole town centre functioned like an open air museum, people going from piece to piece with their catalogues, very studiously. It was amazing fun.

Apparently a magician came round to "Collido_scope" on the Saturday afternoon, and got all the other people there at that time clapping in unision, and it worked really nicely.

Collido_scope was exhibited a second time at the Cube, in late March 2003, for the annual French Internet Festival. This was an occasion to refine the sound interface, and develop the pictorial work. A version 2 will be developed when the possibility for this presents itself, particularly work on the "dreaming" aspects of the installation.