drawing robots & VR installations mark miguel chevalier's seoul exhibition

digital beauty takes over ara art center in seoul

Five-armed drawing robots and interactive tapestries of light take over the Ara Art Center for Miguel Chevalier’s Digital Beauty exhibition. The French artist’s luminous first solo show in Seoul takes over the building with twelve installations, each tailored to the site’s spatial elements in various ways and each questioning our perceptions of reality and immersing us in the expanses of digital infinity. In keeping with 20th-century artistic movements like kinetic and optical art, Chevalier employs immersive, generative, and interactive virtual reality installations on a grand scale. These projections are marked by pixels, networks, flows, and algorithmic geometries, brought to life against the musical compositions of Claude Micheli for a vibrant multisensory experience.

Complex Meshes | all images courtesy of Miguel Chevalier

miguel chevalier crafts a multisensory interactive experience

Miguel Chevalier’s installations illuminate five levels of the Ara Art Center. On a single floor visitors encounter the luminescent installation Complex Meshes, an interactive projection of fluorescent strings, alongside the sculpture Rhizomatic, all weaving a visual tapestry of networks. The interweaving of colored light, layered networks, and varied pathways visually manifests the imperceptible flows and networks floating around and connecting us. Elsewhere, Liquid Pixels introduces a dynamic painting of light shaped by the real-time choreographies of spectators. Here, the digital artist revisits the history of painting, drawing inspiration from the gestural paintings of the 1950s, embodying the technique of electronic dripping.

Machine Vision delves into self-portraiture and facial recognition systems. Viewers standing in front of a camera transition from the real to the virtual world, witnessing their portraits deconstructed in real-time to form abstract universes. In collaboration with Patrick Tresset, Chevalier introduces The Attractors Dance, a five-armed drawing robot. Comprising articulated arms each equipped with a pen, the entity draws five simultaneous images extracted from a perpetually remixed data bank. These synchronised movements give life to a veritable choreography in a decorative exuberance of colours and shapes.

a generative, interactive, virtual reality installation

Complex Meshes and Rhizomatic Luminescent made of fluorescent strings, 1500 steel rods, and UV light

Machine Vision

the Attractors Dance — a drawing robot with five arms

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Digital Moirés and Magic Carpets

The Attractors Dance

Liquid Pixels -- generative and interactive virtual reality installation

project info:

name: Digital Beauty
designer: Miguel Chevalier

coordination: TinLab

technical direction: Voxels Productions

software development: Cyrille Henry, Claude Micheli, Antoine Villeret

film: Thomas Granovsky

location: Ara Art Center, Seoul, South Korea

dates: 18 January, 2023 — 11 February, 2024

designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: ravail khan | designboom