Camille de Dieu and Laurent Novac, both born in 1986, live and work in Geneva.
In 2016, they decided to bring together their individual experiences of the previous ten years by founding studio z1. Blending scientific references with fiction in their creations, they pursue a shared research into new, unreal territories and imagine scenarios of life. As artists and engineer, they present their installations and performances in real time, allowing them to anchor their imaginary and future territories in a particular and intimate present.
The simplest way to describe studio z1’s research is to speak of world-building. These are not utopian or dystopian creations, but rather worlds parallel to our own. Worlds that seem familiar in some respects, yet have undergone changes and transformations that create new emotions, because they are unknown to the visitor.
The studio’s main work is therefore the search for these modifications. In the performance Modell - 1 (2016), the audience enters a sculptural world in which it loses awareness of scale, and therefore of its position in relation to the elements that make up the set. The elements of the landscape are familiar: a labyrinth, sculptures, walls. Yet the forms and textures move and evolve; they are never fixed. These changes contribute to destabilizing the audience, who try as much as possible to hold on to their own experience and their own references.
The installation Holy Synthetic Meteor (2016) offers a guided tour of a meteorite, one created from real-world data and NASA archive images. Yet the materials that govern certain elements of this universe are unusual. The lakes are made of materials reminiscent of mercury or aluminium, the beaches of plastic, and the snow of gold. The research here lies in the study of the natural/synthetic duality. The forms and textures of the elements we observe tell us about their origin: the work of humans or of nature. Here the studio is interested in our reflexes when faced with a situation, and in the relationship between what we feel and our experience.
This study appears almost literally in the interactive installation Horao (2016), a false mirror held up to reality: three Icelandic lava rocks and their digital doppelgängers. This gives the studio the opportunity to play with materials, perspective and light, while keeping a reference object that bears witness to the modifications.
The studio’s installations and performances are often presented as guided tours. The guide controls the forms, the textures, and the expansion or contraction of time and space. This also explains why the real-time aspect of the studio’s works is so important.
NOVA LANDS G1 - C203 H (2018) is a work created in a 360° dome, allowing the audience to be fully immersed in a cosmos created and modified in real time. D100’s Trace takes a similar approach: the performance, and therefore the changes in the world, adapt to the desires and moods of the performer-guides.
The need for real time, and for very precise control over the elements of the different worlds (textures, forms, interactions), whether for sculptures, installations or performances, led the studio to develop its own software tools, giving it finer and more precise control over its creations. The generative nature of the works allows these tools to be used as instruments of both research and creation.
The project Fear Of Murmuration (2019), for example, uses photogrammetry, computer vision algorithms, real-time rendering and generative design, giving the artistic work a very wide range and therefore greater control.
However, the studio does not limit itself to purely digital media, as shown by the monumental work Flocons de cité (2018), created for the Bibliothèque de la Cité in Geneva, the series of ceramic sculptures C-10 (2018), made during the CERCCO residency in Geneva, and the exhibition Divine Nature at the Théâtre de l’Orangerie.