Immersion
Associating cinema, photography and biology, the Immersion installation comprises a laboratory-machine, conceived by Lia Giraud, that produces a living image made by microalgae. Through a computer interface, these images interact in real time with the screening of the movie made for the occasion by Alexis de Raphelis (France, 1983). The fiction recounts the ritual of the disappearance of a disillusioned man in his forties into his “algae-becoming”. The apparatus works as a revelator of the slow process that moves the protagonist: the film influences the biological behavior of the algae and the algae organically impregnate the pace of the movie.
Culture #1
In this all-digital era, Lia Giraud experiments with the concept of living images. Between scientific research and artistic exploration, this principle involves light-sensitive micro-algae that form images according to a process comparable to that of gelatin silver photography. During Festival Images, a real laboratory built inside her Culture #1 installation produced new organic images every day. Displayed in Petri dishes, these “algae-graphs” showed cellular and ephemeral moving images, fostering reflection about the materiality and the potential of the photographic image.
