Neon Minuit

France

Neon Minuit is a duo of artists using digital tools to capture pieces of reality to stage them in their playground: the virtual world. Their artistic approach is inspired by scientific experimentation and serendipity. Using video game tools, they explore and experiment with new ways of perceiving realities, apprehending new spaces and creating illusions. Like modern magicians, they make pixels sing and polygons dance.


Their work is based on the subject of reality. Léon and Dorian scan sculptures, monuments, people or even landscapes that they encounter. This material captured by photogrammetry allows them to explore spaces composed of clouds of points. It is the memory of a past, a spatial memory. This substance allows them to compose works between reality and the virtual, the photo and the screen, the film and the game. It is in these intersections that they deploy a particular aesthetic composed of thousands of suspended points.


Neon_Minuit_3D.jpg

Heterotopia - Laboratoire

Heterotopia_-_Laboratoire_Neon_Minuit_3D.mp4

This artwork is the video generated by Heterotopia, a multiplayer, participatory virtual reality experience that immerses your body in a field of point clouds. The user is equipped with a VR headset and explores within a designated physical area where viewers can enter and create interactions within the VR space. A Kinect is placed above the play area and records people, elements and the environment. Finally, a video projector projects the virtual space into the real world on a screen visible to the audience.

The interactions are made up of several layers: the Kinect point cloud space is synchronized with the VR space, the user sees their body in a first-person view, and their brain creates the illusion of reality. Body contact between the user, the viewers and the environment reinforces the illusion of tangibility. Pre-recorded clouds of dots tell a story, arouse curiosity and spread doubt between what is real or imaginary.

The device is inspired by the concept of heterotopia described by the philosopher Michel Foucault. In general, a heterotopia is a physical representation or approximation of a utopia, or a parallel space. It is a layering of realities combined to experience new sensations, to create new connections between visual perception and tangible feelings.

technique

3d

format

landscape

duration

02:17

year

2020

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