Olivier Perriquet & Lou Galopa

Statement

//// After an initial training in pure mathematics, computational biology and visual art, Olivier Perriquet is currently both a scientific researcher in bio-informatics and computational linguistics, and also exhibits and lectures as a media artist. His artistic work is inspired by the scientific approach and spans different fields an techniques such as expanded cinema, video or interactive installation/performances, addressing questions related to game/play, language or complexity. //// Lou Galopa’s artistic work has a connection with Fluxus: the humor, the utopias and the endless link between art and life. Visual relations, interconnections, double images and word plays have an important role in her works. They often have a humoristic, ironic or sarcastic character but can also reveal even tragic notions. Lou Galopa lives in Strasbourg and Paris. She studied at Ecole supérieure des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg and is a member of the artist group Interim. ////

Artworks

The artistic purpose of our work dwells not in the object itself but in the relations that it creates within the public and in the resulting experience: the public « enact » the artwork by their active participation. In combinatorial abstract games, such as Chess or Go, the player's posture has something similar to the posture of a mathematician demonstrating a theorem, such games are indeed likely to stimulate similar schemes of thougth, resulting internally in a similar experience and, externally, in a physical attitude characteristic to that kind of activity. Beyond the solitary experience involved in pure abstract thinking, the framework imposed by a two-player game is also a mise-en-scene of an agonistic (but nonetheless playful) « relation in thoughts » between two persons. The specific game we propose is the award winning combinatorial game « Alpha » inspired from non-Euclidean geometry, created in 2008 by GaalN.