COMPOSITIONAL
An interview with Infratonal.
Infratonal is a Paris based creative working with digital technology to produce sublime experimental audio-visual art. We are pleased to preview the artists latest series, Unfamiliar Intimacy & Unpredictable Iron.
Tell us a little bit about you.
My name is Louk. I'm an artist based in Paris, I use digital creation technologies in my artistic approach, and I try to marry sound and image through gesture.
You are working with a lot of textures and shimmering colors, what is your interest with texture and where do you draw inspiration from when creating?
I also consider my creative journey as a research project, both theoretical and aesthetic. From a visual aesthetic point of view, my pieces are based on textures as well as shapes. My formal creation is rather intuitive and does not always follow a conscious inspiration. Colors and shapes evolve throughout the creative process until they reach a point, often far from the initial idea, when I consider them very subjectively as balanced.
Creating visuals that move with your hand is a really exciting way to engage with digital art. What does this engagement allow you to say as an artist?
As part of my theoretical research, I am interested in how the digital art form can evolve. Interactive art is, of course, not something new, but I think there is still a lot of room to explore, for example on the nature of musical and visual creation under the influence of gesture. Keeping the gesture within an algorithmic composition is crucial to me. The gesture is a way to explore digital designs sensitively and navigate within data to "make them express something".
What is the creative process of your last project?
In the beginning, the project "Unfamiliar Intimacy & Unpredictable Iron" was based on the evolution of my technical framework. I try to get as much freedom as I can with gesture to control sound and visuals. The line is a fundamental element for me. Indeed, a string could describe all our movements, and that's a perfect data component that is important in my work. I still work on this concept to tame the drawing line in a sense. From this point, it's incredibly liberating as we can dress our line with all "fancy musical and visual clothes" we can imagine. For this piece, I worked on a material I wanted close to the metal, while I tried to turn it into an unconventional shape and sound.
"Through performance, I am able to bring a tangible and human side to a digital piece that otherwise is just a computer program."
What role does sound play in your practice?
Sound is as important as image and gesture in the pieces I create. I see it as an inseparable part of the creation. I have developed a workflow to compose and interpret the pieces' visual and sound rendering in real-time. Through this symbiotic creative workflow, I try to bring sounds and images together in a more unified form.
Your work is very satisfying to watch. How do you know when your work is going to have this feeling on your audience?`
These pieces are also very satisfying to perform, and I sometimes get lost in long moments playing them after they are composed. Through the performances, I am able to bring a tangible and human side to a digital piece that otherwise is just a computer program. And I hope it contributes in some way to conveying this satisfaction to the people that are watching.
Thank you.