Digital artist Electronic musician Interactive designer
INFRATONAL is an artistic project led by Louk AMIDOU, a Parisian multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of digital arts, electronic music and interaction design. After studying visual arts, computer graphics and digital communication, he founded a social media agency and worked as a new media expert before launching a production structure for digital art and interactive experiences.
Musician, graphic designer, and coder since his teenage years, he started his creative practice within the Atari demo scene. He then cultivated a varied creative practice composed of sound and image in his visual productions, electronic music records and digital art projects.
His recent work explores the links between the human and the algorithm. It is centered around three approaches. First, the aesthetic approach explores the hybrid form mixing the musical, visual and gestural in a new behavioral artwork. The technological approach is experimenting with the links between AI and humans and searching for a creative gesture where the algorithm becomes an invisible instrument. Finally, he takes a critical approach about the artist’s relationship to the algorithm. He’s wondering how the human and their imperfections remain a necessary element to an algorithmic process.
His work takes the form of performances or installations in the vast field of digital and interactive art, A/V performance or algorithmic art.
ARTIST STATEMENT
VISUAL AND MUSICAL ALGORITHMIC ARTWORKS
I use artificial intelligence and generative algorithms to create and control interactive visual and musical pieces. They are an abstract and poetic representation of the algorithms themselves and they question their usage in our society. This hybrid data-based artwork is designed to be performed in real-time.
ALGORITHMS AS A NEW INSTRUMENT TO PERFORM
In my approach, an algorithm’s objective is not to directly produce the artwork but to function as a visual and musical invisible instrument that responds to free human inputs such as gestures. I then seek to perform this intangible algorithmic instrument like a musician would play a physical one.
EXPRESSIVE GESTURE TO DIALOGUE WITH A BEHAVIOURAL INSTRUMENT
By removing the tangible, it forces me to develop a specific performative gesture and look for a new language to communicate on an emotive level with this algorithmic instrument. And because of its algorithmic essence, this instrument can perceive the real world, look at the performer and respond with his own vision : It’s then a sensitive dialogue between the artist and the machine.
RETHINKING THE ARTWORK’S NATURE
In this approach, a deterministic nature of an art piece is unleashed as much by the gesture than by the autonomous and unpredictable behavior of the algorithm. This hybrid visual and musical artwork is an instrument and, at the same time, the creative object produced by the performance.
HUMANIZED ALGORITHMIC ARTWORK
In our society, algorithms are not neutral and not explicitly created for the well-being of humans, and they are often used to constrain people and to optimize processing efficiency. Another concern is the gradual loss of control over the algorithmic process due to the high level of abstraction, the increased complexity, and the “black-box” of the algorithm themselves. The result could be massive, cold, dangerous, biased services that conforms blindly to an economic ideology instead of human needs.
My artistic experiment is meant to question the relationship between humans and algorithms. It tries to re-establish a dialogue by bringing embodied presence into the opaque and deterministic algorithmic system. In this vision, the algorithm is a creative instrument that only produces artistic form by connecting with imperfect and spontaneous human gestures and creative intention.