About
Julien Maire
Born in 1969, Julien Maire has been working since 1990 at the intersection of disciplines such as performance, media installation and cinema. The works he produces are live, hybrid entities. They have been shown at Transmediale, Ars Electronica, Digital Art Festival, European Media Art Festival, Film Festival Rotterdam, Film Festival Oberhausen, Sonar, ZKM, ICC Tokyo, Empac, and Powerstation Shanghai. Julien Maire was winner of the Biennale Update_2 award in 2008 and was nominated for the World Technology Award, New York, in 2009. He has been awarded special mentions for the Ars Electronica Prize on three separate occasions.
Medias
Out of Order (Talk in French)
In his artworks and performances, Julien Maire systematically re-invents the technology of visual media. His research is a manifest hybrid between media-archaeology and the production of new media constellations. His output consists of prototypes that perform exactly what their etymology promises (from protos: ‘first’ and typos ‘impression’ or ‘model’): proposing unique technological configurations that produce a new, specific image quality.
As industrial prototypes, these original creations – no matter how technically clever and refined – are rather useless: too complex, too delicate and too clunky to ever be considered for mass-production. As artistic statements, the main function of these full-scale constructions is to provoke an effect of wonder, alerting the viewer to the ambivalent status of moving images produced by a machine.
Extract from Edwin Carels, “The Productivity of the Prototype: on Julien Maire’s Cinema of Contraptions,” University College Ghent - Belgium
Medias
Medias
