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vertical environnement
By : Winants Studio
GRANDS PRIX DU DESIGN – 15th edition
Discipline : Art & Photography
Categories : Art Projects / Visual art : Platinum Winner, Gold Certification
François Winants explores time and natural phenomena to realize new paradigms. He questions the place of art and creation in the translation of the emerging environmental consciousness. He develops instruments, questions photographic processes and uses scientific tools.
The Vertical Environment project is a research and development of instruments to capture the movements of space and the environment.
The project is realized in collaboration with the Trakk and Kikk festival and the University of Namur. It is activated in environments all over the world with the aim of making documentation for future exhibitions. A new kind of event has been invented where nature becomes the museum. QR codes are installed next to the artworks to give the public as much information. In a relationship between art and science, the project is in collaboration with the disciplines of geology and climatology. The artworks are developed for use by scientists.
The project focuses on the interactions between the environment and the atmosphere through time and space. The instruments called "station" and "mobile" can be understood in an aesthetic and edutainment way.
The stations are accompanied by QR codes to give technical, scientific and poetic information. The instruments use plotters, chemical surfaces sensitive to air, rain, heat, humidity and analogue cameras. They record the movement of storms and the weather breathing and changing.
The stations are installed in natural phenomena during human absence. They produce works over long periods of many weeks.
The mobiles are installed on bicycles and focus on the physical experience of space. They represent the invisible such as the air and the states of the landscapes crossed between topography and climate.
The research focuses on current tools to develop autonomous and energy-free instruments. The project questions our anthropomorphic visions through scales of space, time, history and human practices through anthropology.
The project questions the modern dimension of our environment, as we find traces of our societies in landscapes we thought were virgin. Wouldn't a new definition of "environment" be a cultural response to the environmental crisis?
It is a research that focuses on new paradigms in a symbiosis between nature and technology, between satellite data and the plant as technician and indexical, between human temporality and the outcome of nature.
The research of François Winants becomes the witnesses and chemical echoes of a world that moves forward without us.
