Mathieu Pradat

Author, director

Winter 2022

Digital Artist Mathieu Pradat smiling and standing up with his hands interlocked behind grey background

Damien Chamcirkan

Mathieu Pradat's The Roaming, a black sky with stars, a full moon, and large trees reflected in a body of water

Léon Denise

  • New Media
  • Cities
  • Boston
“The space that we build daily builds us in turn.”
Who?
-

My work carries with it the idea that progress comes from justice, that everyone wishes to act for the greater good as long as no one feels ignored, down-trodden, or humiliated. I don’t have a great political vision, but I believe that an unconscious thread runs through all my projects—that there is no community without social justice.

 

As a child, I wanted to be a clown. I was a student for three years, from 8 to 11, at the Fratellini Circus Arts school. I still have a passion for the circus and I believe that its format, where audience participation is key, it is the ultimate form of performance. Without discounting authorship, the group work approach—the idea of a troupe—is central, and taking risks is essential to any artistic project. The artistic vision itself is a kind of innovation and not just the integration of new technologies into a work.

 

What connects architecture, film, and immersive experiences in my creative practice is the writing, and the need to tell a story and to think about space. A space where you can see actions taking place on screen, where one performs actions in experiential settings. The space that we build daily builds us in turn. The human experience is told through this dialogue. The virtual world—through its potential for the imaginary, its ability to heal, its speed and flexibility—confers a new and more radical understanding of this ancient phenomenon.

 

Author, director, and architect Mathieu Pradat focuses his work on the growing interaction between virtual and real worlds, as territories that convey narratives and emotions. His VR experiences and films (The Roaming, Proxima) have been selected and won awards at a number of festivals, including Biennale Cinema – Venice Virtual Reality, the Geneva International Film Festival, the Frankfurt Biennial, and the Rotonda at the Locarno Film Festival. He is the founder and director of La Prairie Productions. A PhD student at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, he is conducting research on the notion of narrative spaces in virtual realities.

What?
+
Where?
+

In partnership with

logo
MIT Open Documentary Lab

Drawing on MIT’s legacy of media innovation and its deep commitment to open and accessible information, the MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore new documentary forms, with a particular focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling. 

 

Learn more

logo
Forum des Images

With more than 2000 film screenings every year, thematic cycles, festivals, international guests and TUMO Paris, Center for Creative Technologies for 12 to 18-year-olds, the Forum des images, sited in the city center, is a major place dedicated to cinema and digital creation.

 

Learn more