An iconoclastic artist committed to hybrid public performance and technological experimentation, Adelin Schweitzer founded deletere laboratories in the south of France in 2013.
This interview was made during NewImages 2024
The A-Team of digital creation
Adelin Schweitzer – The creative process began for me at the start of my studies at the Beaux-Arts d’Aix-en-Provence. Like all the other students, I discovered numerous workshops and different techniques, in various disciplines, and ended up at O.E.I.L. (Objet-Espace-Intelligent-Language), a mechatronics workshop set up by Christian Soucaret. A space for welding, mechanics and electronics, with a whole floor of dismantled electronic objects. Flashback: from the age of 6, working alongside my father on building sites, I learned to salvage, dismantle and explore all things electronic. It was a curiosity that revealed itself very early on, and quickly led me to demystify digital technology. I went on to do all my training in this workshop.
A. S. – I learned everything there was to know about mechanics and electronics, although I wasn’t totally fascinated by the latter… I was more interested in welding, scrap metal and kinetic art. If you had to make an analogy about this period of my life, it would be with “The A-Team“. Then, with my degree in hand, I was immediately offered a creative space, a workshop, at the Cité des Arts de la rue in Marseille. I was able to develop my skills to the full, with no break between my studies and my first “real” projects. There I met street artists, the famous “saltimbanques” I’d been taught to be wary of at Beaux-Arts… Comedians, big tinkerers, people oriented towards live performance, which wasn’t my DNA to begin with – but I learned a lot there. The street arts have always been poorly considered by traditional contemporary art, as have the digital arts, so in a way we had something in common. I discovered Ateliers Sud Side, a structure founded around a garage for enthusiasts of old English motorcycles. Flashback again to Moebius’s “Garage hermétique” in my father’s comics… They were and still are focused on the creation of structures and mechanics of gigantic proportions, etc… All this helped me to forge the spirit that inhabits the deletere laboratories today, that of, to put it quickly, “big, well-realized odds and ends”…
Concevoir ses propres outils
A. S. – I define myself as a device artist: each time, I build the tool I use to express myself on a project. This is a constant in my work. The Sutherland test, my latest show currently in production, first went through a phase of making the helmet I use (the BUD for Black Up Display) before even considering the scenography and dramaturgy. I’ve always done this. I start with a slightly absurd technological fantasy that I realize, and I unfold my thoughts around it. If I go back to my Beaux-Arts diploma, there was already a performance for an audience, machines and installations, but above all simulators. In it, I imagined the fantasy of technology providing an answer to everything through simulation. I proposed a kung fu simulator, a finger-cutting machine, etc. I also invented a celebrity simulator. You’d put on a Stargate-style helmet (the movie, not the series), fitted inside with disposable camera flashes that sometimes electrocuted you when you put them on (the price of fame, no doubt…).
A. S. – I belong to the last generation that was still able to use a computer without necessarily being connected to the Internet, and this has undoubtedly given me a certain point of view on “new” technologies, somewhere between fascination and fear. That’s why today I adopt the stance of a “wildcat trainer”, rather than that of an enthusiast of these innovations. It’s in the DNA of my artistic work to take a critical stance towards all this (tech, marketing, capitalism), and for me an artistic work involving digital technology that isn’t at least a little reflective and political about its subject no longer really makes sense.
A. S. – Without thinking about it, two motifs recur regularly in my work. On the one hand, the helmet as an anonymizing mask. On the other, technology as the subject of debate. The dimension of my shows, with their often collective experience, stems from these two criteria. When I imagined my first AR project, A-REALITY and P03 in 2008, it should be seen as a critical look at the arrival – or return – of virtual reality. It’s a device I created following a meeting in Châlon-Sur-Saône in 2006, with Pascal Chevalier, a veteran of commercial VR in the 90s. I picked up a VR6 from VPL Research, Jaron Lanier’s company, and a few other headsets, to create my own augmented reality device. It’s also thanks to a cultural programmer from Liverpool European Capital 2008 and her Cities on the Edges program that I’ll be able to experiment with this project over there. It will be a machine for defining objective reality, in which I invite the public to experience a given time through artificial organs. These machine eyes and ears will generate an “altered” reality in real time, transmitted live to the spectator. The result will be a 25-minute show for one person. This story will last 5 years, from 2008 to 2013, with just a few spectators a day, and will form the vision I still have today about the XR…
Offering social and introspective experiences
A. S. – Under my producer’s hat – which I became in 2011 when I realized how important it is to be independent when you want to do “impossible” projects – I co-produced with ZINC in Marseille, Le SIMSTIM, a VR installation for a third-party audience who would like to discover the performance experienced in A-REALITY. Thanks to an American collector, in 2011 I’m able to expand my fleet of VR6s and offer sessions for 8 spectators at a time, reclining in hammocks to view the media collection built up during experiments with the P03. In this project, I’ll be exploring the virtuality of the real captured by my machine and the randomness of a meta-machine that draws on its own memory to produce a narrative in time and space from this collection gathered from all over the world… And through it all, the desire to create strong emotions rather than explain how things work.
A. S. – I’ve been following the big comeback of virtual reality since the Oculus DK1, followed by the DK2, which I buy and take apart (obviously). To my great surprise, the headset at the time wasn’t that far removed from the ones I was already using. Except that with them, I was technically freer… I could do stereoscopy, customize the device as I wanted. Here, everything is “different”… So it wasn’t a revolution at all.
A. S. – #ALPHALOOP arrived in 2017, from an opportunity linked to a performance proposal in Bulgaria. I couldn’t show another work they wanted, and I thought again about a commissioned work for the first CHRONIQUES Biennial in 2018. Le Voyage Panoramique, a 360° film on the history of Marseille’s historic thoroughfare, which gives me the opportunity to film with 360° cameras, stitch images, etc., but also to think about how the viewer will come to see the film. Onboarding, as they say nowadays. Someone recommended to me was Fred Séchet, a self-taught actor, used to performing in public spaces, who would later become my artistic partner and writer on #ALPHALOOP.
A. S. – To carry out this project, which consisted of a single sequence shot in tracking mode (!), I designed a production kit with 2 Kodak 360° cameras, enough to stabilize the image but not enough to hide my fist holding the stabilizer. So I had to come up with an idea to justify my own presence. It would be META, the man in black, the pop figure of the posthuman transformed by machines, one of the two antagonistic characters in #ALPHALOOP. For the purposes of the #A beta presentation in Bulgaria, I had to design the concept of the experience (on the imagined practice of techno-shamanism) with a very tight schedule, of course. Between buying the headsets and designing the hardware and software for multi-user use, all under Android, 3 people – NAO, Fred and I – produced the whole thing in 2 months. At the premiere, the public reaction was so overwhelming that we decided to take it a step further.
#ALPHALOOP, and several versions
A. S. – #ALPHALOOP was not an easy project. The ecosystem didn’t exist like it does today, even if gauge issues are still problematic… At the second CHRONIQUES Biennial, I’m invited to do a showcase of the project at the Camp, the new temple of tech erected in the middle of nowhere in the Aix countryside. I take the opportunity to talk about technological spirituality through the following postulate: there’s no difference between the tools of nature, and those of new technologies, to accompany humans (and in particular their well-being as consumers). My various experiments have, almost by default, always sought to demonstrate the impact of digital technologies on both the physical and social body. The medium is also the message: the headset is placed on our head, it’s something powerful. And it can go as far as proposing an altered state of consciousness. That’s why I call it Altered Reality (AltR), rather than augmented. I find the idea of augmentation a bit creepy… Especially when it’s brought in by an industry.
A. S. – At this second edition of CHRONIQUES, I met Merryl Messaoudi from Crossed Lab (who left in 2020, with the studio continuing under the direction of Julien Taïb). Together, we’re going out with a bit more funding #ALPHALOOP_V2. A whole international tour is in the offing, and then comes the Covid pandemic. And finally, after the first confinement, #ALPHALOOP and its small capacity of 5 people per hour 5 times a day was quite in demand and we were able to do a dozen dates in France. This small number of spectators proved to be a definite health advantage! After that, I really struggled to get this project into the XR network, and despite several other international tours in Quebec, Morocco and Europe, it remains a work that’s rather ignored by the network. It’s too “experimental” and they’re afraid the public won’t understand… Nevertheless, it’s been running for 5 years now and the project is still going strong despite the obsolescence of the equipment.
To be continued…
A. S. – I’m in a phase where I really want to examine this medium, XR, in depth, particularly in the face of a mainstream trend that events and distributors often seek out, encouraged in this direction by the public authorities, who are discovering all this as if it had never existed and would like to turn it into a new cultural market. In the end, there’s little room, or desire, for more experimental objects.
A. S. – My question today is this: can we create immersion without the aid of a screen, and instead play on the cognitive biases of human beings to tell the story? I think it’s interesting to try and imagine emancipating ourselves from the headset… This is the story behind my new creative project, the Sutherland test, on which I’m working with Ososphère in Strasbourg and Dark Euphoria in Marseille. It’s about our relationship with images and immersion. It’s a show/experiment lasting around 1 hour that talks about our addiction to images, with 4 actors and a capacity of 20 spectators, which I’ll be presenting, still unfinished, with 2 actors and 10 spectators in November 2024 at the Couvent Levat as part of the opening of the next Biennale CHRONIQUES.
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