Curator Statement

Exhibition. St-Pierre-le-Puellier collegiate church and ÉSAD Orléans gallery, Orleans. March 30 – May 28, 2023

Architectures and landscapes through the prism of virtual realities, augmented realities, artificial intelligence, video games, metaverse, NFT cultures… An exhibition by ÉSAD Orléans and the Department of Culture of the Town Hall of Orléans. An ISEA2023 labeled event

The Earth is heating up. The windows open. It is often in times of crisis that art opens new windows, like so many points of view on the world, nourishing small or large stories. Our windows today are said to be “virtual”. Are the architectures and landscapes they reveal unreal? Are they only of the order of fiction, of dreams, like a projection of our fantasies, our delusions or our intimate or social anxieties? Or do they bear witness to our way of inhabiting the world? Or even the way we give it shape by our machines to record the real, precisely?

Virtual realities, augmented realities, artificial intelligences, video games, metaverses, NFT cultures… populate the USB #5 exhibition · Window(s) on course . Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Rear Window (or Rear Window ), the exhibition brings together a group of artists, designers and art and design students who seek to observe, through the window of art and design, the elements, the geographical limits and the sensitive materials of these parallel universes.

With: Charles Ayats – Alain Damasio & Frédéric Deslias, Adrien Bisecco, Lionel Broye, Thibault Brunet, Julien Clauss, Florent Deloison, Harun Farocki, FelixFelixFelix, Dirk Koy, Julien Levesque, Marie Maillard, Lorna Mills, Joe Pease, Matthew Plummer-Fernández , Jeanne Susplugas, Anna Tolkacheva, Urbandrone, Gwenola Wagon & Pierre Cassou-Noguès.

Also to be seen at the ÉSAD Orléans Gallery, ÉSAD students: Maxence Alvarez, Hugo Delattre, Maguelone Faivre d’Arcier – Noa Gautheron, Max Kerbaol, Claire Mathieu, Scott Mauger, Lola Mevellec, Yoan Schmitt , Amelie Rodriguez, Suzie Roux.

And the Cybercave project.

• The Orléans School of Art and Design (ESAD) (Orleans, France) is a public art school with a specificity: Design and only Design is taught. Its approach is resolutely artistic and turns towards the most contemporary questions. Here, it is a question of the future of the printed and digital edition – or both together; of IoT and data sculpture, of ecological cohabitation and design commons, of media archeology and design of time. This gives the school a somewhat unique place in the educational landscape of Design in France and in Europe. https://esadorleans.fr/en