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Automatique WAR
Alain Josseau
Alain Josseau, Automatique WAR. © Alain Josseau.
A large screen displays a news report composed of images from current political events, commenting on the robotisation of warfare from 2017 to 2025. Through his narration, the presenter actively constructs a mediated reality. As is often the case with television news, the authority of his words is reinforced by the images projected behind him: aerial views of bombed cities and urban ruins. In Alain Josseau's video installation, everything that appears on the screen is produced by a real-time mix of various pre-recorded sources, sources arriving live from the model area, or sources from the internet via specially designed software. The presenter, reporters and other participants deliver artificially generated speeches based on real documents, while the images – as revealed in the exhibition's third section – are created using a rotating array of models and the internet. Filmed by a fixed camera, these models create the illusion of a moving aerial viewpoint. The images thus obtained are transmitted to an editing room, where motorised cameras perform live editing.
Credits
Production assistants: Guilhem de Gramont and Loic Bollati
Alain Josseau
Alain Josseau lives and works in Toulouse. Born in Nantes in 1968, he graduated from the Nantes Saint-Nazaire School of Art in 1992, going on to pursue a postgraduate degree (DESS) in New Creative Technologies in Toulouse in 1993. In 1994, he received a scholarship from the Institute des hautes études en arts plastiques (IHEAP) in Paris, founded and directed by Pontus Hulten.
In 2001, he won a competition to create a piece of art for the Toulouse metro, which was inaugurated in 2007. His works are included in important public collections, notably the FNAC, the FRAC, the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, the Marta Herford Museum in Germany, and that of the City of Lyon. They are also featured in private collections such as the Fondation Francès in Clichy, France, and Photology in Milan, Italy. In 2013, Josseau received The Eye of the Collector prize at the SLICK Art Fair Paris. He is currently represented by Galerie Claire Gastaud in Clermont-Ferrand and Paris.
