On Wednesday 10 January, Montbéliard’s MMI department had the good fortune to welcome Jacopo Baboni Schilingi for a lecture on digital art and the human body.
The lecture resulted from a collaboration between the MMI department, the Doubs département through the regional conservatoire, and France 3 Bourgogne Franche-Comté. It surveyed the relationships between people, gestural interfaces, machine systems and automata.
Somewhere between art and the augmented human
Since the 1980s, art—not yet digital at the time—has acquired systems for augmenting the body’s physical power in various ways, especially visually and aurally. A whole range of emerging practices, based on these principles of augmentation, renews the means of artistic expression. The beginning of a new era was thus firmly underway.
In 2017, in the third millennium, touch interfaces, neural networks and artificial intelligence have become part of everyday life.
Wednesday’s lecture offered answers to questions linking art, the body and digital technology. What is today’s relationship between all these commonplace, interconnected objects and the human body? Is the body really augmented, or is there a particular historical consciousness accepting new forms of virility? Jacopo examines these current issues through contemporary artistic practices and examples from the history of different aesthetic fields.
Who is Jacopo?
Jacopo enjoys mixing experiences and playing with his audience. Originally from Milan, he studied with Ivan Fedele before continuing his studies in Paris. His compositional work is extremely varied, encompassing orchestras and ensembles as well as multidisciplinary installations in which audience interaction plays a central role. This was the aspect he wished to introduce to us.
Jacopo Baboni Schilingi is composer in residence at MA scène nationale, director of the Conservatoire du Pays de Montbéliard’s Composition and Creation department, and artistic director of EMI. His work stands at the crossroads of contemporary music and digital art.
The lecture further strengthens the artist’s connection with northern Franche-Comté. Jacopo’s music is a constant search for innovation and depth, a conceptual and theoretical approach he shares brilliantly. Contemporary music, far from the austerity it sometimes assumes, is an exhilarating adventure. This lecture proved it. IUT Belfort–Montbéliard is fortunate to welcome artists of this calibre, able to explain and share a passion that can seem intimidating. Contemporary music indeed has a reputation for being difficult to access. On this Wednesday, Jacopo showed us otherwise!
Something tells me that the collaboration between the artist, MMI and the Doubs is far from over. Stay tuned…
Written by David Malsot.