Cows
« The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men. » Leonardo da Vinci.
« Vaches » is a series of 5 videos that questions our relationship to the animal world. Are we hopelessly carnivorous or is veganism the future of humanity? Will we ever be compassionate enough to give up our animality and satisfy our appetites without killing?
The videos in the « Vaches » series are photovideographies, photographs that transform over time to change status and become works of video art. By manipulating the pixels of the original images according to algorithms generated with Processing software, they represent the torments that we inflict on so-called cattle animals.
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Jean-Michel RollandDirector
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Project Title (Original Language):Vaches
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Project Type:Animation, Experimental
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Completion Date:October 4, 2021
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Country of Origin:France
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
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Digital Cinema Package:Unavailable
Jean-Michel Rolland is a French artist born in 1972. A long time a musician and a painter, he brings together his two passions - the sound and the image - in digital arts since 2010.
Through video artworks, generative art, audiovisual performances and interactive installations, he questions the temporality, a genuine fourth dimension inherent to moving image, as well as the duality between his two favorite mediums, the sound and the visual.
His formal research is guided by the desire to reveal the intrinsic nature of our perceptual environment and to twist it to better give new realities to the world around us.
His works, always very experimental, are a reflection of the sometimes unexpected internal world of their author and are however the object of an important diffusion abroad. Several have been rewarded for their originality, by United Nations University (Dresden Germany), Digital Graffiti in Miami (USA), Multimatograf (Russia), dokumentART (Germany and Poland), the University of North Carolina (USA), Festival do Minuto (Brazil), Artaq (France), ArchiShorts (Canada) and The International Video Art Review (Poland).
As a long time musician and painter, dissatisfied with the difficulty reconciling the practice of those two disciplines, I have devoted myself, since 2010, to digital arts. Thus my two favorite media meet: the sound and the image.
Through moving image in different forms (video art, generative art, audiovisual performances, interactive installations), I strive to reveal new realities in the world around me. I ruminate on the notion of temporality and the duality of digital arts: the interplay of the sound and the image.
Until 2016, the origin of each of my creations was music. It played a role as important as the image as they influenced each other in an equal relationship. This relation had to take place by natural complementarity (in video art, the constraint of never detaching the audio track from the video track from the initial shot), by co-construction (matching the audio to the video and vice versa as the main element of the creative process) or by cogeneration (in generative art, generation of sound and image by the same algorithms). It resulted in works in which sound and image were so inseparable that one without the other would have lost all meaning.
This period is not over yet, but due to intensive practice, other interests have emerged over time, especially the notion of duration. Unlike the traditional arts, the art of moving image has this fourth dimension which, as with the first three, is first of all to be mastered in order to deliver a coherent work, but which can also become fertile ground for experimentation when one tries to extract its essence.
The works which I described above were already very engaged with this problem, especially through the invented notion of rhythm'n'split where the moving image undergoes a visual but also temporal découpage in a musical logic. However, learning the Java language (which I primarily used to produce generative works of art and interactive installations) allowed me to understand temporality in new ways by giving me the power over the pixel. It is through this research on the succession of each point in each image of a film (or series of photographs) that my current works are based. The result includes videos in which the photographic trace is reintroduced, others which give a temporality to a succession of still images by different techniques, and others which are still to come.
