Fred Périé

Following his education in architecture and engineering, Fred Périé devoted himself to studying and modeling the mechanical behavior of materials; in particular the phenomenon of instability.

The related question of how forms come into existence still features in his current thought.

By 2004, Fred was doing paid research in visual perception. He carried out this research by using two methods: landscape installations, and new media installations.

The passage and disappearance of time are recurring themes in his work. With his piece Infractions - which was performed in 2009 in Liège - he poured red paint on the vines lining the edge of a grove, and also on the ground of a nearby clearing. The notion of infraction is destabilized when it’s revealed that the paint used is wholly biodegradable. Performed several times during the summer, the piece deteriorated under environmental pressures, until it eventually vanished.

With both his landscape and new media installations, the viewer is invited to enter into Fred's work. She becomes part of it. Is it here?, a media installation created in 2007, begins with the participants’ seeing on a screen the chairs on which they’re currently seated; except in the image that they see, the chairs are unoccupied. After a while, the spectator's image appears on the projected image when he moves, but disappears when he doesn’t.

Fred believes that an image - for creator as well as viewer - is precisely the encounter between an absent object and a potential spectator; an encounter which is necessary and desired. Human beings think and interact through such images, and a certain ontology emerges from the relationships implied by this process.

In 2010, What if there, underneath... combines the participant’s image with another in a room apparently beneath the participant. Her other body appears twice: naked, and clothed. We are with our bodies, bodies that cannot not be, and bodies that cannot not be images. We must accept that images, even when loveable, are hopeless. It’s only after accepting this that can we enter into relationships with others; and doing so even becomes desirable.

With the use of computer programming and other computer processes, Fred Périé is trying to reflect these questions in experiments which are at once virtual and concrete.

Generally, the interactive user of computer technology comes to believe that he has the capacity to verify his own power. But this capacity is only apparent. When the artist uses interactivity - which is more or less a kind of mirror - it’s to reveal what I think is really at stake: our ability to project ourselves into the situation.

Fred's new media art works have been shown at digital art centers in France such as Le cent quatre, CAC3 2012, Le Cube, 2008 and [ars]numerica, 2007. Is it here? was shown at Bouillants #3 in 2011 and was nominee at FILE Festival, Brazil, 2010. What if there, underneath... was shown during Computer Art Congress #3 at 104 in Paris, Novembre 2012.

Works by Fred Périé in the Pixel Blanc catalog