Special file about the Holons of St Girons in LE COLPORTEUR N ° 2 (September 2017), cultural magazine of the community of communes of Couserans-Pyrenees.

Holons de St-Girons: Entering dreams, between order and chaos

Computer programmer, cartoonist, visual artist, performer, the artistic path of Aymeric Reumaux is closely linked to the advent of digital technologies. He is particularly interested in the porosity between digital space and public space. As a counterpoint to big data, which leads us to virtualization and the invisible tracing of digital tools, his installations invite poetic contamination of the public space. From video mapping (luminous fresco or illusionist projection) to augmented metal sculptures, new formats emerge, open spaces for sharing, reconnecting with the magical world; the public space is fertilized, mutated by the space of knowledge. The individual is at the heart of the device; each proposition makes us presage of a cognitive urbanism which favors exchange and creation, values singularities, gives back the speech and its right place to each: showcase of the intimate, square of the heart, cryptoportique of the memory, small wood of the tribe, garden of the augmented, bridge to dreams … Suddenly the intimate appears in the public square, dreams emerge before our eyes, the facades are picture rails, the memories come alive and take shape.

How do you consider digital creation?

“For the residences of territory, each creation is considered as the updating of a living experience.The first step is to collect information related to the project: memory, event, questioning, lot of dreams …

Before exploiting this material, I need to go through a phase of virtualization. According to Pierre Levy (What is the virtual?) “Virtualizing is looking for what is powerful in a situation and whose current situation is only a possible update (thus, the tree is virtually present in the seed). The actualization then appears as the solution of a problem, a solution that was not contained in the statement in advance. To reactualize is to consider a new resolution of what the situation contained in power.

In St Girons, with Véronik De Bisschop, we worked from a collection of dreams of the inhabitants. At the Bureau des rêves, openned rue du Bourg, we collected almost 400 dreams, which we put together to feed a black box of dreams from which we generated new dreams. Véronik worked the trace of dreams in dance workshops with locals. The idea was to connect the digital and the body and to break this a priori according to which the digital would only appeal to our mind. Dreams can incarnate, take shape.

Programming is an integral part of the creative process; the final images of the dreams were created on a graphic palette via an algorithmic. The graphic palette becomes as a dreamcatcher. Each stylus stroke plunges into form to capture a dream, to offer a new composition. A part of random intervenes in the creation; the algorithm is an actor in its own right.

We proposed a double format of restitution: performance reading dreams (story, music and video mapping) and augmented pictures mixing digital image, animation drawing and story of dreams. The various paintings were placed in the public space: church square, on the bridge, in the shop windows of traders, each was invited to play via his smartphone application his own score of dreams. ”

What are the specificities of your creative work?

“The first specificity is the articulation between animation drawing and programming. The second, in the combination between a technological dimension and a very artisanal work method: the hand-drawing animation, image by image in line with the technique developed by Max Fleischer (1923), rotoscopy (process which consists of reproducing image by image, an animation sequence from filmed images). ”

There is a chaotic dimension in your images.

“Chaos is a state that appeals to me, like many poets, artists or thinkers. Chaos is everywhere in nature; it is an integral part of us. Arthur Koestler in his book The Phantom in the Machine proposes a definition of the world from a simple hierarchical structure; he makes the notion of holon emerge, as once a whole and part of another all greater than himself; thus the atom is a whole organized and part of a molecule which itself is a whole and part of a cell, etc. until the multiverse composed of all the universes. Humans, societies, are intermediate level holons. And the holon finds its balance between order and chaos. Holon is also the name I gave to my animation characters and the different projects I’ve been working on for a number of years. I like working on this balance between order and chaos. ”

The criss-cross of figures also evokes parietal traces left in the caves.

“I like to consider video ‘mapping’ in the form of a wall art; I really like Jean Clottes’ hypothesis that “despite their realism, the ornate panels were not the result of a simple accumulation of images; they went well beyond that and were real passages to the spirit world, […] “(shamans of prehistory). In both cases, a combination of drawings closely related to the rendering surface immerses the viewer into a magical world. There is an animist dimension here too, the wall becomes alive.

The digital revolution marks a decisive anthropological break through the reconfiguration of our relationship to time, space and others. I’m part of this transition generation: the last who grew up without the Internet. The change is so fast and radical that one can easily imagine that in a few generations, man and society will have so much changed and mutated that our generation will seem as remote and unfathomable as cavemen can be for us. In this context, I like the idea of composing with the archaeological trace.

In animation drawing, I reconstruct the movement by a succession of still images. On the contrary, to produce these traces, I compose with the sum of the drawings, decomposed, fixed, amalgamated; time becomes material to carve: to fragment the movement, to skate time on itself, to capture an imprint, a precarious posture stolen from the inevitable flow of time. Like a rock painting, this digital imprint marks the seal of a world already past: digital revolution, collective intelligence, genetic experiments, transhumanism, geological alteration … mutations are everywhere, the human is suspended in this world in metamorphosis.

Colporteur N ° 2- Sept. Nov. 2017 – Community of Communes of Couserans-Pyrenees