REACTIVE MATTER - Presentation

- Can you introduce yourself?

We are the artist couple “Scenocosme : Gregory Lasserre & Anais met den Ancxt”. We work together since 2004. As media artists, we explore capacities of technologies in order to draw sensitive relationships through specific stages where senses are augmented. Our works came from possible hybridizations between the living world and technology which meeting points incite us to invent sensitive and poetic sonorous and/or visual languages. We translate the exchanges between living beings and between the body and its environment. We suggest interrelations where invisible becomes perceptible.   Most of our artworks are interactive with the touch, in order to play with sensitive degrees of proximity and intimacy. We explore how visual and sonorous virtual matters can evolve according to proximity and the depth of the touch with real elements like fabric, natural elements like leather, plants, wood, stone, clay,...

- Can you present your project Reactive Matter?

The Reactive matter is made of small robots: “the Blinky Blocks” in accordance of claytronic atoms (or catoms). The principle is to create small interactive objects that can be assembled to in order to create large structures. This is the concept of synthetic reality.  By assembling and interacting together these catoms would make it possible to obtain objects as easily modifiable. 
Our artistic project is to use the Blinky blocks forcreate several sculptural and interactive artworks with organic behaviours.
We want to approach the notions of rhizome and develop specific cellular structures like interactive roots able to transmit information, light and sound such as nutrients or stimuli. The bricks of the work are also like voxels in a real physical space. They can be assembled like cells and have the ability to function in interdependence but they can communicate with each other. We also want to add transplant to the cellular robots and inject them different behaviours.
When we concept our artworks, the technology is hidden, it disappears in order to enhance sensory relations with various elements. We are interested to explore possibilities of hybridizations between this programmable matter and other elements in order to extend possibilities and textures of this material, to discover several qualities of artificial and sensitive skins.

- What do you expect from this residency? 

We are interested to develop new interactive artworks which explore the quality of real and virtual touch, and its various significances. Most of our artworks explores our relationships with natural elements by creating sonorous or visual languages and feedbacks in order to question spectators of their relationships with our contemporary environment. We would like to think and work with the scientists of the possibilities to use the technology of the programmable matter in order to design new artworks and new ways of interaction with the public. The concept of electronic clay could cross our artistic approach. In most of our artworks, we explore the symbolic surface of the skin, it porosity and it various interactions with the environment. In our work, we suggest links between natural elements and objects with virtual sounds, lights or images.