Electronic Shadow. Naziha Mestaoui, architect, and Yacine Ait Kaci, multimedia creator. The complementary skills of the founders of Electronic Shadow express their project: the fusion of built space and digital imagery in a context where 'the size of habitat keeps getting smaller while the surface of screens keeps getting bigger' (home cinema). With Electronic Shadow, architecture becomes a reality expansible to infinity, a support for interactive projection in which the interface or focal centre remains the inhabitant or the visitor, an organic being of flesh, blood and imagination.
Because if it is tempting to resort to prospective vocabulary that is always intimidating (cyborgs, hybridization of virtual and real, digital avatars,...), installations by Electronic Shadow use elements that are archaic and universal before anything else and inscribed in the tradition of the image painted or transfigured by light or living space. Perhaps it is in magic, in other words concealed technology, that we should look for ways to understand the trans-disciplinary approach of the tandem: art, architecture, design and live shows. Realms of action in which the stakes in play remain the same: magnify the real while hiding technique, the 'thing' that thrills the spectator-user.
Aligning their production to fundamentals - on one hand artistic creation, on the other, the everyday application of research in the traditional context of commissions for architecture, design or scenography, Electronic Shadow mount art-work exhibitions all around the world (MOMA, New York Pompidou Centre & Espace Electra, Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, MOCA, Shanghai...) as well as innovative propositions.
It is in this spirit that they will be 'illuminating' the Frac Centre in 2010, in collaboration with architects Jakob & MacFarlane, following a competition that promotes light and image as the key components of contemporary art and architecture. Electronic Shadow produced two live shows, one with dance (Double Vision with Carolyn Carlson, 2006) and one with Music (Futurinô with Rinôçérôse, 2009).
Electronic Shadow received The Grand Prize of Japan Media Art Festival, a Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica and several Trophies at Laval Virtual.
www.electronicshadow.com