Pittsburgh Cultural TrustGo to the home page

SHOW TITLE: Matter and Memory
ARTIST: Julien Maire
CURATOR: Murray Horne

The U.S. debut of French Installation artist Julien Maire, an artist who works with experimental forms of projection, highlighting simultaneously both the simplicity and the complexity of reality.

"DEMI-PAS"

20 minutes 2002

Projection-performance

Demi-Pas is a short film and is projected using a 'reversed camera' technique. A projector has been converted to house micro-mechanisms that produce animated images using a principle similar to that of cinematography. »Demi-Pas« thus finds its own narrative methods, its own action and images, like a kind of projected theater. Real objects and photographic material are transposed within the projector. Based on this experimental form of projection, the film narrates a tale that has anextremely simple storyline: one man's daily routine. » Demi-Pas« is a short film that constructs an everyday reality, thus highlighting simultaneously both the simplicity and the complexity of this reality.

Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski

Please note that Siegfried Zielinski is talking about my first performance with slides (1993-1998) the performance was show for the first time in Germany during the Transmediale 2001 / Demi-pas was show for the first time in Germany in ZKM in 2003 (Future Cinéma)

Timothy Druckrey - Julien Maire's Imaginary Archaeologies

Maire’s Demi-Pas (Half-Step) transforms the image machine into a time machine by evoking both mechanical and physical movements. The adapted projector of his earlier work becomes a computer-assisted one in this work. The ‘stepper motors’ and the ‘half steps’ of human motion are linked as the projected images establish a dynamic relationship between image and movement, sensation and narrative. By layering image and performed interventions into the projected scenes, the images and operations differentiate themselves spatially with perceived realities weaving in and out of perceptibility. Maire’s performances play in the interstices between machine and image and provoke a serious reconsideration of the ‘cinemaginary’ interface.