| | A photo safari in the land of war 1997 - Golden Nica Ars Elctronica 1998 | By Maurice Benayoun - Golden Nica Award in the Interactive Art category in 1998 a musical creation by Jean-Baptiste Barrière |  | Showed for the first time in September 1997 at the Ars Electronica Centre (Linz, Austria),World Skin is an interactive artwork conceived by Maurice Benayoun, developed and produced by Z-A, AEC and SGI. video 1 video 2 | | Armed with cameras, we are making our way through a three-dimensional space, the CAVE system The landscape before our eyes is scarred by war-demolished buildings, armed men, tanks and artillery, piles of rubble, the wounded and the maimed. |  |  | This arrangement of photographs and news pictures from different zones and theaters of war depicts an universe filled with mute violence. The audio reproduces the sound of a world in which to breathe is to suffer. Special effects? Hardly. We, the visitors, feel as though our presence could disturb this chaotic equilibrium, but it is precisely our intervention that stirs up the pain. We are taking pictures; and here, photography is a weapon of extinguishing. Each of us can take pictures, capture a moment in this world wrestling with death. | | Each photographed fragment disappears from the screen and is replaced by a white silhouette. Each exposure is printed out to paper. This is about the status of the image in our process of getting a grasp on this world : The world falls victim to the viewer's glance, and everyone is involved in its disappearance. |  |  | The interactive soundtrack composed by Jean Baptiste Barrière is there to enable us to go beyond the play of images and to experience this immersion as real participation in the drama : the sound is there to transform progesssivly the cameras'clic into a machine gun sound. The world is victim of the The world falls victim to the viewer's glance, and everyone is involved in its disappearance. World Skin has been presented at Imagina (February 98) at the Art Show of the Siggraph 98 this summer and at The Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm in December. | WORLD SKIN
by Maurice Benayoun
Music : Jean-Baptiste Barrière
Software : Patrick Bouchaud, Kimi Bishop (SGI), David Nahon (Z-A), Gilbert Netzer (AEC)
Graphic preparation : Raphaël Melki Production : Ars Electronica Center, Z-A Production, Silicon Graphics Europe
With the help of : Golden Nica of the Prix Ars Electronica 98 of the ORF (Upper Austrian TV Channel )
FutureLab of the Ars Electronica Center, SGI. | | |
