18) Google as a medium (EDT/15)

Lionel Bayol-Thémines
18) Google as a medium (EDT/15)

Photographs: Lionel Bayol-Thémines

Text: Marc Lenot

Pictures: 24

Year: 2018

Price: 2000 €

Comments: This artist’s book, size 33 x 24.5 x 3 cm, is composed of three leporello of 8 images each and a cover taken from the photographic work of Lionel Bayol-Thémines Google as a medium. Drawn in digigraphy on photographic paper Hahnemühle smooth cotton and enriched with a essay by Marc Lenot. Drawn in digigraphy on photographic paper Hahnemühle smooth cotton. Edition of 15 + 2AP signed by the artist.

This project is composed of the following series

Space, Nature, Blind Zone, Cities

The first photographers of the 19th set out to explore the world with their view camera on their shoulders, in order to document the planet, its landscapes, people and their customs. With the Google as a medium / Data landscape project, Lionel Bayol-Thémines swaps the camera for a computer coupled to satellites and a shooting program to explore a new space behind a screen, the «Big Data». The very principles of photography (point of view, framing, decisive moment ...), are still called upon. He tracks down of landscape representation errors, bugs, and uses Google as a new medium for creating images, he forces the program to produce the accidental, the improbable, the unexpected and the unpredictable by the experience of not respecting its usage protocol. The main concerns of this work are to explore this new geographical space, these landscapes, to document something virtual, to question the diffusion of images and the programs that generate them. It is an experiment on the very nature of the photographic medium and an investigation on the mechanisms of image diffusion through digital networks.

Referring to the definition of scientific experimentation by Claude Bernard, Clément Chéroux, in his book " Fautographie. Petite histoire de l’erreur photographique ", emphasizes: experimental photography « consists, in the purest tradition of Claude Bernard’s experimental method, of intentionally varying the conditions of the experiment, that is to say the parameters of the photographic device, in order to observe precisely the aesthetic consequences of the operation ».

Lionel Bayol-Thémines