Generativity The question of the re-appropriation of the media is central to many filmic practices in the fields of art. This may be the case for Jacques Perconte, who is also the author of the rushes that he usually captures in nature and in the form of sequence shots, by walking, by car, train or boat, camera in hand. This is how he seizes light outdoors to rework it in his studio. As he said to Violaine Boutet de Monvel:

“The scenarios of my films are dictated by the geography of the landscapes, as well as the story that unfolds during their perception. In a way, they are walks. The narration settles in the transformations the image suffers. First and a priori naturalist, it emphasizes the landscape, its plasticity, and then it becomes less objective, maybe more impressionist. Light draws, colour magnifies, matter prevails, and finally the landscape slowly becomes abstract. Familiar at first, it becomes an expressive and mental space.” [14]

Generativty

These “transformations in which the image suffers” are intimately linked to the operations that the artist performs in his studio by voluntarily altering the encoding of the previously captured video sequences. His method is experimental, for a cinema that is just as much. He proceeds by small corrections of code that echo the accumulation of layers in painting. And it is then that “matter prevails” in the space of the exhibition, when the artist has to accept a form of letting go. The duration of the work is infinite and there is not an approximation, in the image, that will be repeated at any time. This is the generative part of his work, in this endless accomplishment programmed without any kind of repetition.

There is, when these landscapes become “little by little abstract”, something that is of the order of viscosity in painting. Especially when the artist interrupts the process of recreating his works to obtain prints as he did in 2014 during the creation of the series Alpi. All the particles of his images come from the “geography of the landscapes”, but it seems that they have intermingled with one another during the process of their transformation. The code, which describes them perfectly, has been altered without them nevertheless being accidents, the term approximation being more adapted here. It is a form of approximation that is inherent in the random processing of large amounts of data. The main interest of generative works often lies in their non-predictability. This is the case of the work of Jacques Perconte who only establishes rules by altering algorithms so as to be surprised by the half filmic, half pictorial material that emerges from them. And it is by injecting error into the computer code of his works that he succeeds in doing so, responding to the question posed by Norbert Hillaire: “Is there still a place for the incalculable part in a work of art?” [15] In a period of time, which is that of the spectator, Jacques Perconte problematizes the passage from the landscape to the abstract as many painters have done in the past, certain Impressionist works being in the exact middle between these two types of representation. And it is with the “incalculable part”, preserved by systems of image processing that are being ever more perfected, that it succeeds.

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Video Mapping

In the art world as well as in the world of innovation, which are domains that often inter-connect, it takes a long time to finally identify practices or uses. Thus, the filmic practice of Jacques Perconte ended up being named datamoshing, and Tony Oursler used the technique of video mapping in the 1990s, long before it spread under that name.

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14_ Violaine BOUTET DE MONVEL, “Jacques Perconte, the Digital Image and the sublime”, in Digitalarti, N°2, Paris, 2013, p. 26.

15_ Norbert HILLAIRE, “L’art à l’âge du numérique”, in Art Press 2, N°29, 2013, p. 9.