Eager to continue its openness to contemporary creation and to produce original digital content, the Musée d'Orsay invites the artist Laurent Grasso to extend the installation of his film ARTIFICIALIS, by inventing a format specially designed for digital platforms. This project entitled Spectral Orsay allows a radically new experience of the museum's nave, combining the most contemporary technologies with the memories of this place and its representation.
This project is made up of three films designed by the artist: the first is broadcast on July 9, a few days before the end of the presentation of the film ARTIFICIALIS in the nave. The other two will be broadcast at the end of August, one month before the opening of the exhibition Finally the cinema !.
Spectral Orsay highlights the deeply cinematographic character of the Musée d'Orsay itself - a museum whose collections cover the era of the birth of cinema, now integrated into the permanent course. Filmed by means of the LIDAR scanner, photogrammetry, drone and virtual animation, far from the beginnings of the history of cinema, this project mobilizes cutting-edge technology, opening up a new territory mixing the real and the virtual and which allows a new vision of the building and the sculptures in transparency.
“Spectral Orsay starts from the nave of the Musée d'Orsay, where my film ARTIFICIALIS is currently being presented, in order to emit a kind of fluid that comes to life in the museum and explores every nook and cranny. An extension of the film and a new look at a monument, its architecture, its interior and its exterior, this strange presence reveals the magnetism of the most famous figures as the most hidden places. »Explains Laurent Grasso.
ARTIFICIALIS already included different image regimes including the LIDAR scanner, but also the microscopic scanner and special effects, in order to show the world in its diversity and its transformations. The film assembled these heterogeneous elements for the public physically present in the nave of the museum. Spectral Orsay operates the opposite movement and shows the Musée d'Orsay, in its architectural reality, as a station then as a masterpiece of postmodern architecture designed by Gae Aulenti, on digital platforms. Laurent Grasso intends to mobilize here the latest scientific tools to probe the invisible energy of the Musée d'Orsay and offer an immersive exploration of a totally new kind: “Just as the invention of perspective organized the gaze and the vision of 'in a new way,
The artist offers a reflection on the building, starting from the LED screen that he inserted in the nave, to break down the physical presence of the museum: that of the nave itself, but also of La Danse de Carpeaux, and up to the clock - which appeared in its time in The Trial of Orson Welles. He thus offers, in animated images, a new portrait of the place: a portrait that is at the same time coherent with the history of the institution, with his own work on the material of the museum and the history of art, and with its practice frequently mobilizing the most advanced technologies. He reveals the museum as a dream space, whose time here seems to be accelerated and dilated. This new format, designed specifically for fast time and archiving, therefore offers an answer to the questions posed by the development of such digital experiences.
Laurent Grasso lives and works between Paris and New York. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Saint Martin's School in London and Cooper Union in New York, he was awarded the Marcel-Duchamp Prize in 2008 and a resident of the Villa Medici in Rome. His work has been presented on the occasion of numerous individual exhibitions conceived in immersive devices, as currently at the Musée d'Orsay with the installation ARTIFICIALIS (until July 18), at the Jeonnam Museum of Art in South Korea, at the Center Pompidou x West Bund Museum in Shanghai, or at the Parvis de Tarbes (Midi-Pyrénées). He is represented by the Perrotin and Sean Kelly galleries, New York.