Temporary Branches

In Temporary Branches, 2016, the electronic "landscape" underlying much of our everyday visual environment, of which we are often unaware, becomes a tangible presence that creates an experiential connection with the viewer, together with the physical place hosting it.

The work originates from some photographs of branches, which were shot during a walk in a wood. These images are transposed into a vectorial programme, through a process conducted by the computer and subject to chance happenings. The inability of the software to create curves without fragmenting them into infinite segments, generates not only the synthetic shape where the fragmentation of lines is invisible, but also a series of paths which evidence the construction of the drawing. These paths become polyurethane rubber and PVC flexible objects.

The installation appears as a flow, which may ideally grow endlessly, with longer and bigger branches, adapting to space thanks to the flexibility of the materials composing it. Bright red pieces alternate with transparent ones, less clearly perceivable, but whose density becomes evident according to the points of view and on the way light passes through them.

In software development temporary branches are lateral "zones" of a project, where to solve problems or experiment changes. They should have a defined lifetime and then be deleted to avoid confusion.

The piece is a reflection on our relationship with reality, where subjectivity and technological devices are in permanent hybridisation. It plays with the fascination for new, widened perceptive horizons, but also with the feeling of an abstraction growing to a point of no return.

Temporary Branches was presented at the exhibition LumièreMatière, Académie royale des Beaux Arts, Brussels, 2016.