Julie Blanc is a graphic designer and student researcher. She is preparing a PhD in ergonomics and design at the C3U team (Laboratoire Paragraphe, University Paris 8) and EnsadLab under the direction of Anne Bationo Tillon and the co-direction of Samuel Bianchini. This doctorate is part of the ArTeC university research school (Art, Technologies and Creation).

At EnsadLab, Julie works for the Experimental Publicization axis of the Reflective Interaction research program. Her work and research mainly focuses on the design of multi-media editorial objects, both digital and print. Her main study is on the recent shift from desktop publishing software to the use of web development technologies and methods (HTML5, CSS3, javascript, epub) in editorial chains and particularly in design practices. She also works on the implications of automated typesetting on graphic design.

Julie is part of the collective research of the PrePostPrint and works on the development paged.js, a free and open source Javascript library to make book in browsers.

website: julie-blanc.fr

Quentin Bréant was born in 1986 in Le Havre. He joined École Régionale des Beaux-Arts de Rouen after secondary school and obtained his DNSEP arts in 2009 by focusing his work on fiction and politics. His fictions mix reality and imagination, contemporary geopolitics and absurd situations. Its realizations are not attached to one sole medium: the plurality of the employed means allows the viewer various ways of access. In 2009, he joined École Supérieure d’Arts du Havre in the Graphic Design section. He then discovered a new facet of multimedia and created programs taking into account the user’s activity. He then explored the multiple possibilities of interactivity, from sound rhythms to movements in space. He attached great importance to the graphic result of the work.

Silvia Dore is a graphic designer and co-founder of the graphic agency Stereo Buro, teacher and student researcher on the emerging practices of participatory processes in graphic design. Currently research master’s student at the University of Strasbourg, she is starting the pre-doctoral year at EnsadLab in the “Reflective Interaction” group. She is a AFD member since 2019 for public procurement ethics, she co-organizes the exhibition “Common point” with Romain Diant.

Website: www.stereo-buro.com

Charlotte Gautier is a visual artist, scenographer and student researcher. She lives and works in Paris. Graduated from École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 2014, her practice is transversal and concerns both the Visual Arts and the Performing Arts fields. Her work has been the subject of several exhibitions in France and abroad (Nuit Blanche de Bruxelles, 6b, La générale, Hors-les murs du Palais de Tokyo, Cité des Arts, Mairie du 5ème, Casa de Velazquez in Madrid, Centre National des Arts de la Scène in Beijing, etc.). In 2014, she joined EnsadLab’s SAIL group, working in collaboration with glass craftsmen to create lighting devices integrating blown glass. Nourished by this work on caustics (interactions between light and glass), she joined EnsadLab’s Reflective Interaction group in 2015. There she developed a research work on light inspired by natural phenomena as well as on the connections and interactions between the public, the artwork and the exhibition space. She attempted to recreate immersive spaces in which digital and analog combine to write organic light scores. Her devices generate or reveal sensitive dimensions capable of disrupting the aesthetic experience. They plunge the spectator into a situation where the loss of reference points opens up an imaginary space, where the body swings out of time and space for a simultaneous sensory experience of light, movement and matter.

Website: charlottegautiervantour.fr

Currently an artist and student researcher at the Reflective interaction research program from EnsadLab, Raphaëlle Kerbrat graduated from Beaux-arts de Nantes in 2017. In her work, she is interested in the paradox of digital “immateriality” in relation to the hyper-materiality of the infrastructure that supports it. The artistic devices that she develops attempt to reveal “infra-ordinary” phenomena, stemming from the uses of digital technologies, by a material manipulation of their media. By confronting the information processing systems on their own condition, they reflect the paradoxical and unwavering link between digital and analog, information and matter, language and support.

Website: raphaellekerbrat.com

Anahita Hekmat is an Iranian new media artist. Her body of work includes a wide range of mostly traditional media such as photography, drawings, videos and installations to new technological media such as interactive and urban setups, websites and locative media projects. She is working both solo and in collaboration with ethnologists, musicians, programmers and other specialists to create the Multidisciplinary Multimedia experiences. She hybrids ethnographic methodology and subjective imagination. Her works speak to coherent a relationship between visible and invisible. This report seeks to articulate around vision, what we see by being in direct contact with reality and the mental image that this reality has created in the mind that feeds it. Anahita uses closed spaces, found or constructed tunnels, dark rooms and hide places for making a trajectory for the spectators as a result of an in-situ experience. By using architectonic elements related to the past and destroyed (such as vestiges), she is questioning the ability of a specific space to recall and reactive the memory of the past in the present time. The world of childhood is a recurring motif in her body of work. The childhood and rites of passage function as a referential basis for universal temporal units. Thus, each viewer can find a space-time base which is both very personal and common. In her videos, Anahita works from fragments of images (filmed in general during her journeys) that create a documentary approach. By editing, time stretching, manipulating and overlaying images, she is letting forth a poetic and mythical fiction. In general, her work builds a suspended time in which the characters, abstracted of their spatial dimensions, graze the boundaries of documentary and fiction. In her installations, she confronts several screens that she puts into dialoge. This type of medium also allows images to resonate with sounds to deconstruct the Ordinary Time. She generally uses projection as reminiscence of facts which actually experienced. Sound has a great importance in her work. Sound composition is used to add spatiality. It adds the distension of time in Anahita’s closed universes — the audio layers superimposed with their corresponding images, to provide a space to explore, a memory pool.

Website: anahitahekmat.net

Tom Huet is a visual artist, lighting designer, scenographer. Graduated from EnsAD in 2012, his work covers various types of creations: sound and light installations, staging of immersive plays, kinetic sculptures, scenographies of events and theatre, sound creations. In parallel with his research at EnsadLab in the group Reflective Interaction, an interactive light axis, he collaborates with various artists and companies, and supervises “sound and light installation” educational workshops in middle and high schools. Flows, reversal, vertigo and nothingness are some of the main notions he explores. The appearance of simplicity, minimalism, are the result of an approach that implements a reflection leading to the purity of forms, passing, in everyday life, by the refusal of waste, the attempt to recover and the diversion of objects. The idea is to find a right form while appealing to an economy of means. In his works, light and sound interact and disturb the perception of space, thus making sensitive changes to it. His work around the phenomena of perception, reflection, illusion, goes beyond reason and takes place before feeling. It begins the troubled and confused beginnings of a sensation. Through the evocative power of these elements, he seeks to create psychoplastic spaces, in other words, spaces that can translate feelings and provide sensations, emotionally charged spaces.

website: tomhuet.com

Quentin Juhel is a graphic designer interested by digitals tools and their alienating power on the user, whether the person is a designer or a fan of new techology. Graduated from a Master of la Haute école des arts du Rhin in Strasbourg, he joins the Art & Design Research Laboratory at EnsAD Paris (EnsadLab) in October 2017, in which he begins his research about the alienating power of the tools in graphic design. He questions graphic forms, practice as well as the ideology emanating from designing tools. He is interested by the production of creative tools which are non-conventional ones. More generally, he questions the social, polical and economical issues inherent to the usage of our tools.

Websites:
juhel-quentin.fr
verso-blog.fr

Born in Fort-de-France in 1990, Olivain Porry graduated with a DNSEP from ESBANM in 2015. Firstly interested in painting, he developed, during his studies, a reflection which concentrates on the relationships between the individual and technologies of communication. The main part of his artistic practice is creating programs, machines and generative and participative processes. His attraction to science of communication urged him to envisage a doctorate within the EnsadLab where he works on the notion of perception in networks through the technologies of communication.

Website: olivain.art

Oussama Mubarak is a new media developer and conducts a PhD research project at EnsadLab in partnership with the Cnam (the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, Paris) in the domains of HCI, interaction design and data visualization. Born in Jordan in 1982, he has performed Computer Science studies in the U.S. before moving to Europe in 2007. He has since worked on multiple cultural and experimental projects using emerging technologies in collaboration with artists and creative agencies. His thesis, entitled “Designing and Modeling Collective Co-located Interactions for Art Installations”, explores art installations that enable co-located interactions, focusing on the conditions – whether spacial, material, or human – which affect the ability for participants to co-construct a common aesthetic experience in the absence of orchestration or a preannounced goal to be achieved, and proposes a set of tools and guidelines when designing such installations.

Website: semiaddict.com

Marie-luce Nadal is an architect and a visual artist. Her research is closely related to the space flow, movement and fluidity. Attracted by the set design and the visual arts during her studies in architecture, she founds in 2004 a collective based on contemporary expression called “STARTXXI”. “STARTXXI” gave birth to different installations like “We Come In Peace”, “Ca ne Nous Rendra Pas l’Octroi”, “Qui M’aime Me Suive”. In 2006 she won the initiative grant, that allowed her to work on a fog device in the Atacama desert. She lived several years abroad and now is based in Paris. In each country she settled in, she worked with various scientific and artistic organizations such as the CEAZA and CONAF in Chile or PIMPOLHOS Rio in Brazil. In 2009, while she was at La Plata in Argentina, she graduated in Architecture and Urbanism. The project she lead was dealing with the creation of a multi-pole mode focusing on the dynamic flows and their interactions between la Plata and Buenos Aires. In 2010, she was selected to present her work at the exhibition “Mobilités” settled for the OFF of the festival “VISA pour L’Image” in Perpignan. In 2011, she joined École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in the Set Design section, where she focused her researches in the interpretation and production of synthetic landscapes. In 2012, she offered a plastic representation of Rimbaud’s “Bateau Ivre” as a pilgrimage into an evolutive climate. This performance was made with objects diverted from their regular use. In 2012, she joined the DiiP/EnsadLab (now Reflective Interaction) and the SACRe doctoral program. In 2013 she organized the first part of “Apparences du hazard”, a workshop investigating the perceptions of wind and its traces. She is currently pursuing her artistic research in the practice based PhD SACRe within DiiP (EnsadLab) and the Laboratory of Physique et Mécanique des fluides en Milieux Hétérogènes (ESPCI).

Website : www.marielucenadal.com

Dominique Peysson lives and works in Paris. She’s a plastic artist, after being a scientist. She began her professional career as a lecturer in physics for three years, after doing a post-doc at Cambridge University (England) and a thesis at ESPCI. She has worked on the properties of polymer materials with a liquid crystal nature. She then became a self-taught illustrator and published numerous illustrations in newspapers or books, and created or illustrated a dozen children’s books. She then returned to university training and followed the L3, M1, M2 courses at Paris 8 (Saint Denis) in contemporary art and new media (with honors). She is currently a visual artist and has just joined EnsadLab’s DRii program, now Reflective Interaction, at École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, where she aims to make the link between physics laboratories and contemporary art research. In October 2011, she began a doctoral thesis at Paris 1 Sorbonne directed by Olga Kisseleva: “Aesthetic experience, physical experience: new materials in the test of interactivity”. She has been teaching since 2012 at École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC) with the teaching team of the course “Arts, sciences, Technologies, Society: Practices of Scientific Mediation”. She has organized Art/Science events. She has been giving art classes to children and adults in the cultural centres of Rueil-Malmaison since 2005.

Website: dominiquepeysson.net

Bertrand Sandrez is a graphic designer trained at École Supérieure d’Art des Pyrénées de Pau. In 2011, he joins EnsadLab, the research laboratory of École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, in Paris, to pursue a post-graduate degree for three years. At the time, he worked for the Écrans Mobiles et Récits Interactifs group led by Jean-Louis Boissier and Dominique Cunin, and for the Reflective Interaction group led by Samuel Bianchini. His approach consisted in the creation of new forms of narratives and relied on the mobility consciousness of mobile screens. Today, he is devoted to his work as a graphic designer. At the same time, he continues his research in workshops in secondary schools or high schools such as Fondation 93 in Montreuil.

Alexandre Saunier lives and works in Paris. After graduating from ENS Louis Lumière as a sound engineer, he joined EnsadLab in the laboratories EMeRI in 2012 and DiiP (now Reflective Interaction) in 2013. Thanks to his knowledge in various fields of sound engineering and interactive systems, his work is encompassed by a common practice of physical computing. Among other titles, he is a technicien at Digitalarti’s Artlab and frequently assists local and international installation artists such as Zimoun and Antonin Fourneau. His work associates both computer and physical systems in order to put into question our perception of digital machines, to find a sensible link with abstract processes.

Website: www.alexandresaunier.com

Born in Madrid, Marcos Serrano lives and works in Paris. Doctor in human-machine interaction and interaction designer, Marcos has long been interested in the frontier between science, art and design. After training in computer science at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and at École Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique de Grenoble (ENSIMAG), Marcos chose to focus on human-machine interaction, a multidisciplinary field that allows him to take a different look at the digital world. He then joined the IIHM research team at the Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory, where he completed his doctorate and participated in various research projects. Among others, Marcos is responsible for a working group (workpackage) within the European research project OpenInterface, dedicated to multimodal interaction. His thesis work in human-machine interaction focuses on conceptual and software methods for prototyping multimodal interfaces, interfaces involving several modes of interaction, such as speech, gesture or touch. In 2008, he joined the DRii program of le Cycle supérieur de recherche & création (now Reflective Interaction) of École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsadLab) to continue his research on the design of interactive devices.

Website: www.marcanudo.com

Céline Shen is a French artist and designer. Educated in Paris, she studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne University. Her passion for fashion and dance led her to train as a clothing designer at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and at the same time study Choreography at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Her collection is inspired by garment’s aura and the couture artisanal techniques acquired after taking her first steps within the house of Alaia. In between art and fashion, her creations are at the crossroads of several disciplines: surveillance digital arts, photography, performance, installation, video and choreography.

She is taking part at the pre-doctoral year at EnsadLab in the “reflective interaction” group.

Lauren Tortil is an artist and researcher, her approach takes many forms—publications, installations, videos, performances and workshops—that question the process of listening and the semiotic of sound, in relation to power. After studying Fine Art at HEAR in Strasbourg where she graduated in 2010, Lauren continued one year at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, in Israel and Palestine. Back in France in 2011, she studied Space Design at ENSBA Lyon and obtained in 2013 my master degree (DNSEP with the honors of the jury). Her work has been shown in several cultural institutions in France such as the Center Pompidou, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Salon de Montrouge, and recently at La Villa du Parc; and abroad at the Sound Gallery (CZ) and during the 11th Biennal of Architecture of Sao Paulo (BR). In addition, she is the laureate of several residencies among which: Factatory in Lyon (2018), Villa Belleville in Paris (2017-2018), Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2017), Générator in Rennes (2016) and Triangle France in Marseille (2014).

The publication of her book Une généalogie des grandes oreilles in 2019 (winner of the 5th edition of the ADAGP Revelation Artist’s Book Award 2020), lead to a cycle of three personal exhibitions and a series of performances called Lecture affective, in 2020.

website: laurentortil.com

Benoît Verjat is a graphic designer and interactive designer. A graduate of École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, he now combines, in the field of new media, real professional expertise and a forward-looking commitment in the field of research. For more than five years, he has been designing and producing numerous multimedia projects in the cultural field (la Gaîté lyrique, le cneai=, le cnap, le centre d’art de la Villa Arson, Joris Mathieu) on a personal basis or for various workshops (Atelier Pierre di Sciullo, studio géneral toffe). Strengthened by the openness that this professional investment has allowed him, but eager to question in greater depth the means, methods and forms, Benoît has also been engaged for a few years in research that he is testing in several settings. For this reason, he joined EnsadLab’s DiiP program (now Reflective Interaction) to confront advanced interactive devices and in particular gesture capture in its relationship to image and data representation. Wishing to share this approach as well practical as reflexive, he intervenes at École nationale supérieure d’art de Nancy in order to submit new logics of graphic production and to initiate projects putting into practice the new visual states it generates. In this same dynamic, he integrated the founding team of the school pointvue which, with light forms, initiates to the production and the audiovisual edition in network. In conjunction with the development and sharing of his research, Benoît joined the interactive designers collective g-u-i in 2011, which combines commissioned work and research.

Website: benoit.verjat.com

Hugo Scurto (1993, Marseille, Fr) is a researcher, musician, and designer. His research employs art, design, and science approaches to inquire, develop, and study machine learning technology within an ecology of music. His practice consists in creating interactive sound and music dispositifs in which machine learning seeks to reveal and reconfigure the entanglement of individuals and their material environments. Hugo is currently postdoctoral researcher at EnsadLab, and co-founding member of wolfgang, a Paris-based music design collective. Before this, he completed a doctoral thesis in Machine Learning and Music Interaction at IRCAM (2016-2019), and was visiting researcher at Department of Computing, Goldsmiths University of London (2015-2016). He graduated in Physics from Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay (2011-2016), received the MSc in Engineering from Sorbonne Université (2015), and trained in Popular Music at Cité de la Musique de Marseille (2005-2011). With the support of a diversity of people, Hugo has publicized works and co-organised workshops in international conferences and academic reviews such as NIME, SIGGRAPH, or PLOS One, as well as in cultural places such as Friche la Belle de Mai, Le Cube, or Lutherie Urbaine.

Website: hugoscurto.com
Twitter: @hugoscurto