The Eye of the Machine 2019 in Montauban

On the occasion of the reopening of the Musée Ingres in Montauban, in the heart of Quercy in Occitania, Miguel Chevalier proposes the installation Eye of the 2019 machine. This project falls within the broad framework of the City's cross-cutting project on the theme "Which culture(s) in the 21st century? Between Memory and Innovation. Transmit! "organised during the year 2020 by the Cultural Development Department.

This new work of generative and interactive virtual reality designed specifically for the Ingres Bourdelle Museum, revisits some of Ingres' masterpieces. Various of the painter's emblematic paintings are metamorphosed in real time thanks to a computer program.

In the superb Black Prince's room, sensors installed on the medieval vault capture the movements of each visitor; these, recorded by the digital device, cause distortions in the image then projected, which undergoes a process of tessellisation, breaking them down into thousands of polygons.

Pursuing the anatomical deformations desired by Ingres, who prefers to sacrifice verisimilitude to beauty, this interactive installation generates new forms. The lines and contours of the bodies, so important to the painter, are accentuated, stretched to the extreme by the movement of the visitors.

With Eye of the 2019 machine which generates essentially algorithmic images governed by technological logics, Miguel Chevalier questions the materialization of the image in the era of its electronic reproducibility.

This exhibition also testifies to the inexhaustible inspiration that Ingres' works offer to today's artists.

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