Samuel Bianchini | Talk at Benaki Museum | Photo Festival | Athens | June 8^th 2022

Rather than proposing a form already produced, finished, an artistic apparatus (“dispositifs”) poses the conditions of what, eventually, will be able to make work, by operating according to the circumstances and / or the activities of those who will take part in it. To compose apparatus is to arrange and to regulate relations of forces so that they can become operational. The artistic apparatus can “move” us and mobilize us because they are themselves, potentially or effectively, in operation, and because they are carriers of representation able to affect us, to involve us, such political representations. Acting as “aesthetic concerns”, such apparatus provide outlets to cooperate with or through them. They provoke and allow the constitution of publics involved in the implementation of these representations.

Closely associating this process of representation with images involving social and political reflection, Samuel Bianchini inscribes his approach in an “operational aesthetic” that he claims and that he will present with the help of many of his realizations, while referring to the book Practicable that he published, with Erik Verhagen, in 2016, at MIT Press.

Picture credit :

niform, interactive installation, Samuel Bianchini, 2007-2020

Engineering (image capture and treatment): Colin Bouvry

Original photograph: Jérémie Giniaux-Kats
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, February 2020, “Hors Pistes – Le peuple des images” Exhibition

A CiTu, Dispothèque, Numeriscausa and Bouillants co-production, with the scientific collaboration of the Laboratoire d’Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l’Ingénieur (LIMSI-CNRS), with the advice and support of Sylvie Tissot, Paul Girard and Stéphane Maguet
This project was funded in part by the French Ministry of Culture & Communication (DICRéAM program) and the City of Paris.
The 2020 version use the Zilhouette software developped by Colin Bouvry in the framework of the Reflective Interaction Group of EnsadLab, laboratory of The École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsAD), PSL University (Paris Sciences et Lettres) with the support of The Chaire arts & sciences of École polytechnique, EnsAD-PSL and Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation.

An artwork dedicated to Alain Declercq

Photograph: © Samuel Bianchini – ADAGP