Empreintes

2015

Depth sensor, computer, projector

Three.js, WebGL

Béatrice Lartigue, Lab212

Sébastien Courvoisier

The gesture is by nature ephemeral: it fulfils itself in time and disappears with it. Empreintes formulates an inverse hypothesis — what if the gesture could settle, leave a visible mark of its passing?

Through the tracking of their hands in motion, visitors generate shapes in the projected space. The depth sensor translates gesture into data, data into image.

What we see is not the gesture itself, but its trace — at once its testimony and its absence. The trace is never the thing itself: it is what remains, what persists when presence has withdrawn.

Empreintes plays with this tension: the visitor is there, active, producing — and yet what they make has already begun to escape them, to take on a life of its own.

The shapes evolve, distort, alter. The imprint is not a stable archive: it is subject to duration, to degradation, to a progressive forgetting.

The hand, interface between the body and the world, reveals a hidden dimension inscribed in our most ordinary gestures.

LUX Scène Nationale, Valence, FRA

Catherine Rossi-Batôt