Making artworks in the emerging field of new media arts is incredibly exciting.

Yet, building an economic model around this practice is very challenging.

(a thread)

A practice based on new technologies often implies trying the latest gadget, the upcoming tool, the newest update.

Hurry, tomorrow it will be obsolete.

Quick, build your online presence, before it's shut down.

https://vine.co/u/909047515024867328

I see a parallel between the insane production rate of gadgets from the tech industry, driven by market sales and shares growth, and many experiments I did, that failed to go beyond the "tech demo".

It's a common idea that "up-to-date" tech helps make better works.

It's a delusion.

I just checked, I own 20+ computers, 12 high-end graphics cards, etc..
Retrospectively, I think all my best works could have been made on any old laptop.

Cultural events love new works.
New commissions, new residencies, world premieres.

Since 2007, I worked on about 90 new projects.

65 were only shown once, sometimes only for a few minutes.

Many of these projects were very ressources-intensive:

- months of work and research
- weeks of computer renderings
- many international flights

For a 15 minutes piece, shown only once.

To correct the first tweet of this thread:

The economic model may be tricky, but it's not the real problem.

The main issue is to find a SUSTAINABLE model, that doesn't consume ressources and ideas for "single use" projects.

I wasn't expecting the crisis to hit so early and so hard, and declining all projects and travels was a difficult decision, but we got "lucky" with the timing.