Maurice Benayoun


Maurice Benayoun is a French pioneer, contemporary new-media artist, curator and theorist based in Paris and Hong Kong. His work employs various media, including video, computer graphics, immersive virtual reality, the Internet, performance, EEG, 3D Printing, large-scale urban media art installations and interactive exhibitions. Often conceptual, Maurice Benayoun's work constitutes a critical investigation of the mutations in the contemporary society induced by the emerging or recently adopted technologies.

Biography

Born in Mascara, Algeria in March 1957, from a father killed before his birth in the Algerian independence war. He moved to France in 1958, following his mother and his brother, to live in popular suburbs in north Paris where the family stayed during most of his childhood.

Video art and computer graphics

Taught in Contemporary and Fine Arts, Benayoun's practice rapidly moved to photography, video and computer graphics. In the 1980s, Benayoun directed video installations and short videos about contemporary artists, including Daniel Buren, Jean Tinguely, Sol LeWitt and Martial Raysse. He keeps from is Fine Arts background, a critical and conceptual approach of practice.
In 1987 he co-founds Z-A Production, an innovative computer graphics and Virtual Reality private lab, that became one of the leading companies in France in the field during this pioneering time. This is where he started exploring the potential of the most advanced media.
Between 1990 and 1993, Benayoun collaborated with Belgian graphic novelist François Schuiten on Quarxs, the first animation series made of HD computer graphics, exploring variant creatures with alternate physical laws.. From the pilot to the series broadcast in prime time in 1993, Quarxs received numerous international awards.

Interactive Art, Virtual and Augmented Reality

In 1993, he received the Villa Medicis Hors Les Murs award for his Art After Museum project, a virtual reality contemporary art collection.
After 1994 Benayoun was involved with more virtual-reality and interactive-art installations. One important work from this period includes The Tunnel under the Atlantic, completed in 1995. For his first solo show, Maurice Benayoun, was presenting a Virtual Reality installation linking two big museums: the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. More than a technical performance, that it was too as the first intercontinental virtual reality artwork, this installation was one-of-a-kind example of what Maurice Benayoun calls architecture of communication, another way to explore the limits of communication presaging the rise of the phatic in human communication.
World Skin, a Photo Safari in the Land of War, created together with the composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière, is an immersive installation often presented as a reference in virtual art. One of the first virtual reality work with a specific content: the relation between, war, personal engagement, and memory, World Skin was awarded the Golden Nica, Ars Electronica 1998, the major distinction in interactive arts.

Interactive exhibition design

The Navigation Room and The Membrane were created for the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris. The Navigation Room, could be considered as the prototype of the interactive educative exhibition, deeply immersive, with highly personalized visits and content generating a web page dedicated to each visitor. The Membrane — the core of the exhibition Man Transformed — was a large surface breathing and feeling the presence of the visitors, digesting and distributing information in constant physical dialog with the public. Benayoun defined this as organic design. The Panoramic Tables for the Planet of Visions pavilion for Hanover EXPO2000, directed by François Schuiten, was an innovative application of augmented reality. In 2006, with the architect Christophe Girault, they created War and Peace, the permanent exhibition inside the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, that opened in February 2007. War and Peace questioned the significance of a national monument dedicated to Napoleon's Army. The exhibition was destroyed in fall 2018, during the Yellow vest movement in Paris.
After Art Impact where he used for the first time VR binoculars to share the experience of watching Benayoun conceived and directed the exhibition Cosmopolis, Overwriting the City, a large scale art and science immersive installation presented during the French Year in China in Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, and Chongqing. This immersive exhibition received in Shanghai up to more than ten thousand visitors per day. This was Maurice Benayoun's first experience in China, and the reception by the public played an important role in later Benayoun's move to Asia.
Benayoun initiated in 2005 the series of works Mechanics of Emotions presents the Internet as the world nerve system and world emotions as a possible material for the new metaphoric model of the economy. In this series, Benayoun produced many installations and urban art projects during the 10 years that followed.

Urban Media Art

Benayoun started to work on urban media in 2002, with Watch Out! in Seoul, an urban installation about surveillance commissioned by the Art Center Nabi. In 2008, he exhibits in Shanghai streets NeORIZON, a large scale urban installation that converts the public into QR codes that become the building blocks of the city.
From the series Mechanics of Emotions, he produced many urban screen artworks, Emotion Forecast.
To extend his vision of Urban Media Art, Maurice Benayoun launched in 2014, as a curator, the Open Sky Project, inviting artists, and MFA students to conceive and present works for one of the largest screens in the world at the time, the Hong Kong ICC media façade. This program offered to more than 100 artists and students, the opportunity to exhibit their work in the public space. The ICC media façade represents about half the surface of the Hong Kong Skyline video displays.

Education, teaching, and lectures

To finance his studies, he became in 1978, a secondary school teacher in fine arts and literature. Benayoun graduated in Fine Arts in the early 1980s, when he was already teaching full-time. He was awarded in 1982 with Aggregation d’Arts Plastiques, a highly competitive degree in the French education system leading to a tenure position, opening the doors of University teaching.
From 1984 to 2010 he was an assistant professor at Paris 1 University, Pantheon-Sorbonne, where he was co-founder and art director of the CITU research center together with Paris 8 University. CiTu, dedicated to research and creation in the emerging forms of art, is where he developed many National, European and International collaborative Art and Science research programs.
In 1995 – 1997, Benayoun was the Invited Artist and Professor at ENSBA, the French National School of Fine Arts.
In 2008 Maurice Benayoun submitted his blog, The Dump, a dump of undone art projects, as a doctorate thesis entitled: Artistic Intentions at Work, Hypothesis for Committing Art at Université Paris 1, La Sorbonne. Supervised by Prof. Anne-Marie Duguet, the PhD thesis was awarded "mention très honorable, avec felicitations du jury". The defense in front of an international examination panel, published in 2011, was a performance fully video recorded.
In 2010, Benayoun became an associate professor at Paris 8 University, where he founds H2H Lab, a cluster of public and private labs envisioning art as an advanced form of human mediations. The same year he co-founds Arts-H2H Labex a research lab lead by Paris 8 University. In August 2012, he becomes full Professor in the School of Creative Media of City University of Hong Kong. He is Chair of the School of Graduate Studies and the PhD programme.
Maurice Benayoun gave more than 300 invited and Keynote lectures in major universities and international conferences. This includes Columbia University, Cornell, Duke, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, SFAI, Parsons School of Design, University of Toronto, UCL, Goldsmiths, Ecole Polytechnique, ENS Ulm, Keio University, Central Academy of Fine Arts, to name but a few.

Key concepts

Critical Fusion

Maurice Benayoun calls Fusion the mix of Fiction and Reality. It leads to what Guy Debord calls the Society of the Spectacle. Metaphorically, the name is inspired by a compound of Critical Mass and Nuclear Fusion, 'Critical Fusion' is the practice of Fusion when the introduction of Fiction is a way to make visible the invisible instead of hiding the reality: "the fusion of fiction and reality to decipher the world".
History of the concept:
Maurice Benayoun first introduced the concept of Critical Fusion to define his action in the virtual or physical public space. Watch Out! in the streets of Seoul, helps people understand that they are at the same time Big Brother and his victims. Other works like NeORIZON in Shanghai and All the series Mechanics of Emotions, even online are considered based on the same principle: Using facts, data, to present the emotional state of the World in the future.

Urban Cosmetics

Maurice Benayoun talks about Urban Cosmetics when the work of the artist attempts to beautify the City through entertainment and decoration.
Urban Cosmetics is the opposite of Critical Fusion.
History of the concept:
The concept of Urban Cosmetics was first introduced during the ISEA Conference in Sydney, 2013. The conference was held during the Vivid Sydney festival. This concept became instrumental in legitimating the artist's intervention in the public space, to describe what should be avoided, or simply not considered as a consistent artistic practice.

the Global Body

After Marshall McLuhan's Global Village, the status of human interactions has been altered by the development of information networks. Maurice Benayoun presents the Internet as the World Nervous System. Any of the connected people become like nerve endings, capturing, transmitting and sharing information. The interconnected world becomes equivalent to a Global Body. Anything affecting a part of the body is immediately felt by the entire body.
History of the concept:
The concept is frequently used by Benayoun since 2008.

Extended Relativity

A model from physics to understand the process of subjective data mining and urban navigation. This model allowed Maurice Benayoun to create KITSUN, a subjectivity based compass for urban survival. He wrote two papers together with his homonym Maurice Benayoun, an eminent nuclear Physics scientist. Benayoun coined the name Web Cubed or Web3 to express the next level in the evolution of technologies, from Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Web3 integrated the subjectivity in the dimensions of the mobile networks.

Neuro-design

Neuro-design is a method of design based on BCI, Brain-Computer Interaction. The Neuro-design is not the projection of mental images from the brain to machines but the assessment of dynamic forms through the observation of the designer's positive or negative emotions during the biofeedback process. Neuro-design is a form of physically-passive interaction based on a feedback loop between the computer-generated shape, considered as an artificial life form, and the brain considered as the ecosystem where the form should evolve to survive. The transmission of the resulting shape from one user another is a form of inheritance, and the dominant shape descriptors are inherited by the following designer creating a chain of iterations supposed to convert gradually an individual design into a collective process based on the participative assessment of the resulting shape.
History of the concept:
The concept has been developed while working on the Brain Factory project, an extension of the Big Reificator Project. Value of Values, Transactional art on the Blockchain, 2019, is also based on Neuro-Design.

Sublimation vs Reificationhttp://benayoun.com/moben/2017/08/29/artificial-intelligence-all-too-human/

Maurice Benayoun identified two main trends determining the evolution of the human experience confronted to materiality.
Borrowing the term from chemistry, Sublimation is the operation converting the world into data that can be treated at the same time by natural or artificial intelligence. This allows the cognitive integration of the physical as well as its absolute control.
Coming from Karl Marx, Reification is the conversion of thoughts into objects. The process requires EEG and BCI in association with construction technologies like 3D Printing.
History of the concept:
These concepts contributed to the theoretical foundations of the series of works the Big Reificator that became later the Brain Factory developed in collaboration with Tobias Klein.

Maieutic Engine

In 2011, a research project initiated by Maurice Benayoun, Egonomy developed the technology behind the Maieutic Engine, an intuitive search engine based on behavior analysis and non-declarative queries. The Maieutic Engine is inspired by Socrates' Gnothi Seauton. The user is invited to explore a huge database of images and the engine gradually refines the recommendation. The Maieutic Engine is based on an n-dimensional vectorial database. The user follows ones inclination like the water following the line of greater slope. Applications include the image database of the French Réunion des Musées Nationaux with more than 800,000 pictures from the French National museums.
History of the concept:
The origin of Egonomy comes back to 1995, when Maurice Benayoun was conceiving the Tunnel under the Atlantic. Virtually digging into a database of images, the visitors improved gradually the quality of their finds. Back then, this first engine was called Gadevu, from the Quebec expression arrangé par le gars des vues meaning: 'made to succeed like in a movie'. This intuitive recommendation engine based on serendipity, became later Egonomy. The research program included many partners like the Pompidou Centre, Paris 8 and Lyon 2 universities and the CEA.

Transactional Aesthetics

Transactional aesthetics is an art practice based on using the exchange, the transaction of information material, process, data, artworks, as a medium.
History of the concept:
Maurice Benayoun developed the concept around the IN OUT project, a participative experiment based on "connective creation" or "Peer to Peer" creation. With the development of the online, on-site project, it became soon The Art Collider, "a network of artworks" involving SFAI, San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, Cornell University and many other international partners such as , Lina Stergiou, making artworks that feed each other, questioning the concept of intellectual property and ex nihilo creation.
Related projects
Other project like the Dump, and the Opendump, online platforms to share undone art projects, even inviting artists to realize the already published project are typical Transactional Aesthetics. interactive installation environment and interactive urban actions envision how human transactions, aesthetic and social paradigms can be carefully and openly reconsidered, with the latter being the recipient of Athens Think-Tank Award, Municipality of Athens.
Later, VoV, The Values of Values Blockchain-based Crypto Currency art project is probably the most explicit transactional art project.

Open Media

From the year 2000, considered his works as a form of Open Media Art, paraphrasing Jon Ippolito, not limited to the traditional forms, media and economic schemes of art, but necessarily based on a specific medium, digital or using technologies. Open takes ici the sense of freedom in the means of expression.

Infra-realism

has been coined in the early 90s to describe the specificity of the new form of realism emerging from 3D computer graphics.
History of the concept:
During the production of Quarxs, the author, new media artist and theorist Maurice Benayoun intended to make the difference between visual realism based on the transcription of how the world reflects light, and what he called Infra-realism, or "realism of the depth" or "the deep realism behind the surface" where, beyond the perceptive appearance, shapes stem from the application of principles coming from physics, optics, chemistry or biology. We could call this,,, or biomimetic simulation. To illustrate the concept, Maurice Benayoun used during his talks and lectures, to differentiate visually represented water - as light effects that can be translated into shades or colors - and the same effects generated thanks to fluid simulation and light propagation algorithms. 3D graphics allow to "simulate" clouds, water, smoke but also behavior like flocks of birds or fishes... Even light reflection becomes an application of physical phenomenons. more than the automatization of visual analogy as practiced by painters and photographers, 3D computer graphics realism becomes an activation of the sub-layer of reality.

In virtual reality and augmented reality

Based on real time graphics, virtual reality and augmented reality make an extensive use of infra-realism. The VR artworks created after 1993 by Maurice Benayoun like "Is the Devil Curved" or the "Tunnel under the Atlantic" often refer to the concept of infra-realism even regarding the use of artificial intelligence.

SAS

In a seminal text, Art After Museum, Benayoun coins SAS as any kind of interface that allows to go from the physical space to the virtual Reality space. Explaining the technology may evolve, but the necessity to have a transition from the "real" to the space of fiction that we call "Virtual Reality". SAS is a French word coming from the Latin, that designs the apparatus that allows us to go from a human-compatible space to a more "hostile" environment. The airlock system in a submarine, or the double door system in a bank are a "sas". So are the CAVE VR system or the VR Head Mounted Display. The SAS Cube created in 2000–2001, was the first PC based cube of Virtual Reality.

Behavioural Design

In 2003, Benayoun presents in Marseilles, France, a performance/conference anticipating the future of the Internet of Objects, IoT. He describes the behavior of objects in our environment that have a strong social impact and alter deeply our daily life. He suggests avoiding an excessive submissive behavior that would amplify our natural inclinations and limit the potential of the unexpected. In an ironic fictional research project, He proposes the creation of an "Integrated Psychic Disorder Generator". The Behavioural Design is the design of connected and AI-driven objects based on social concerns and artificial life models.

H2H, Human to Human

In reaction to the excessive use of acronyms such as B2B and B2C that reduces human interactions to mere commercial transactions, Benayoun proposes to consider mediated interactions as H2H: Human to Human generalizing the use of the acronym to all human mediations. He contributed to the definition of the Lab of excellence of Paris 8 university naming it "ARTS H2H".

Selected awards

General sources