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Reflecting her training as an architect, Marie Sesters video installations evoke the elegance and spatial complexity of a well-designed building. Her recent work includes the installation L'Architecture du Paradis, five computer-animated video sequences projected onto the walls of the gallery and accompanied by sound and light effects. These images juxtapose Sester's impressions of five distinct "and highly mythic" cities: Babylon, Jerusalem, Atlantis, New York City, and Paradise. Each video sequence is composed of diverse computer images taken from archeological documents, city maps, aerial photographs, architectural plans, neon signs, and X-rays, all of which slowly morph from one to the next. Sester's mesmerizing sound track of music and spoken words (e.g. Plato's "Critias" and the Mesopotamian text "Gilgamesh") was created by composer Thierry Fournier using the editing program Inferno. L'Architecture du Paradis is based on mythology and "utilizes the concept of place to examine the relationship between the tangible [elements] (buildings and neighborhoods) and the intangible [elements] (identities, values and histories) that define a city or region." The work creates a utopia that merges the cultures, values, and ideals of all five cities. Earlier works by Sester also explore man-made environments. Settlement a reconstructed life-size "dwelling" of transparent Plexiglas. Settlement is an invented space that liberates the viewer/visitor from preconceived cultural or ideological associations with architecture while probing the disturbing nature of thwarted expectations. Artifice and Sensation, an early example of Sester's video art, also used sequences of combined artifacts in a slow-moving and ethereal visual collage that probed layers of cultural ideologies and the idea of the city as a monument. --Barbara Lee Williams, Leonardo/ISAST Awards Committee chairperson __________________________________________________ (artist questionnaire) Date of birth: February 8,1955 Date and location of your first major exhibition: Centre d'Art Contemporain de Rueuil-Malmaison, Paris, France,1995 Location where you currently work (city and country): Paris, France, and San Francisco, California, U.S.A. How do you see technology changing art for the good or ill in the next decade?: There has always been a major challenge for the arts to confront science and/or technology. Art, as defined in the Western world, should be the means to criticize, balance, or [contradict] politics, media, and economics --- or any kind of power that tries to take over the place and the thoughts. The main question is how technological imperialism is affecting the world. The artists will use technology as a major tool not only to create new perspectives but also in a critical way to reveal the values that technology involves. __________________________________________________ to learn more about Marie Sester's work, visit this website http://www.pica.org/htdocs/fictional_cities/marie_sester.html |