Mohamed Bourouissa
Artist, photographer, sculptor, director
May 2022
- Visual Arts
- San Francisco
"My project seeks to question our relationship with new technologies, the system of control, the centrality of power through migration and mass effects."
In much of my work, I question the relationship of authority, control, confinement and surveillance, while also taking an interest in the issue of migration. These themes are particularly present in my work: Temps mort (2009), a film shot with a mobile phone, in the photo series Shoplifters (2014), in Link (2019), a semi-documentary film on sex and new technology, or in Brutal family roots (2020) and Network (2021), a series of portraits generated by artificial intelligence. In my current projects, I use new technology both as a medium and as a subject.
Mohamed Bourouissa studied at the Arts Décoratifs in Paris and then at the Fresnoy. Since 2002 he has been developing a photography practice, drawing, and creating video rooted in social reality. By subverting the technical purposes of his chosen media—photography, video, installation, sculpture—Mohamed Bourouissa homes in on power relationships and the forces controlling our world. His works often engage with the way in which an image can be constructed in order to approach a situation or a political subject differently. Mohamed Bourouissa was born in Blida, Algeria, in 1978. He lives and works in Paris.
As part of this residency, I would like to develop a living sculpture using drones, and to observe the metamorphosis of living movement into mechanical and algorithmic movement.
The drones would be animated by flocking code. Flocking is the behavior exhibited when a group of birds is foraging or flying. It is a collective movement emerging from simple rules followed by individuals, without any central coordination
The use of drones to represent this behavior serves to question our relationship to new technologies, to the control system, to the centrality of power through migration, mass effects.
During lockdown, I was struck by the use of drones in public space, to control individuals and encourage them to return home. I felt there was something very threatening about this particular use of drones, which reminded me of Hitchcock's film The Birds.
I started working on processing to understand flocking. During my residency, I would like to develop this code in 3D and find the encrypted information necessary to draw the space or shapes in an exhibition space. For now, I will work on the A.I. component that will control them from the cloud data of the visitors of the exhibition. I would like to find a way for drones to generate a particular movement based on the copied data.
My residency will take place south of the San Francisco Bay Area in California, in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of so many start-ups and a wealth of technological innovation. The city of San Francisco itself is a hub innovation in the fields of A.I. and facial recognition. I would also like to reside in Portland, where many engineers from Silicon Valley move to find a new environment and counterculture. My method of work has always been based on immersion and fieldwork, based on the people and things I come across.
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