WATERFALLS - NICOLAS SASSOON
This was part of an ongoing series of articles that was released digitally throughout July 2022. They were first published in the print edition of the Bright Moments Quarterly that was distributed in July in London.
Thank you for agreeing to an interview amid the preparation of your Waterfalls exhibition in London. How long have you been working on this series?
Waterfalls began in 2012, when I created a series of 6 abstract digital animations for an exhibition at the Centre d’Art Bastille in Grenoble, France. As with much of my work dealing with abstraction, I have continued to develop the body of work for about ten years now. For Bright Moments, I decided to revisit the Waterfalls series and create 100 completely new works stemming from this practice-based research.
With my abstract animations, like Waterfalls, I use my distinctive take on moiré patterning. With these kinds of patterns, two overlapping images generate the illusion of a third. There is a significant amount of experimentation involved in my process, which happens in Photoshop; it takes a lot of trial and error to achieve the results that feel right. Each series I make is unique but there is cohesion across them because of this shared technique, which I have developed and refined for the last 15 years.
You explore the themes of your work on digital animation for long periods of time. How do you decide when the work is finished?
The work is never really finished, which I find exciting. I can explore and revisit a specific body of work over large periods of time. If we take Waterfalls as an example, I made the first works in 2012, I exhibited them several times. After that, I continued to work occasionally on the series. For the exhibition and release with Bright Moments in London, I revisited this series entirely. I wanted to create 100 new works that would continue the research I had started 10 years ago. It was a very exciting challenge, I’m really grateful for the opportunity to release this new chapter of my practice through the exhibition in London.
Deciding when a series is finished never seems to be an issue for me. In my creative process, I produce a lot of works and then I proceed by elimination until I have found the most successful pieces. I see it as writing a never-ending book: I want to continue writing pages and chapters in the book without ever knowing when it is finished.
Early computer graphics are one of the main inspirations for your work. This influence is also very present in Waterfalls. “Retro” and “nostalgia” are terms that pop up in discussion of your work to describe this influence. I am not sure whether these terms are really adequate. But I would like to ask what fascinates you about the aesthetics of the early late 1980s and early 1990s, a time that saw the first mass distribution of computer-generated images?
I really appreciate this question because it gets to the heart of my practice. For the first 25 years of my life, I lived in coastal cities in France. It feels like I’ve always been near the beach, doing a lot of activities related to the ocean, alone or with friends and family, like surfing, diving, swimming. Of course, this has had a huge influence on my life and work.
The other big influence from that time of my life was early computer graphics. We had an Apple Macintosh and an Atari 2600 at my house; I played with them every day. My favorite games were always the ones depicting environments that seemed connected to my own environments: domestic spaces and natural landscapes.
From an early age, I tried to connect these two very different, but equally formative experiences: an experience of oceanic landscapes and natural forces, and an experience of abstract and pixelated screen-based images.
What interests me about early computer graphics from the 1980s and early 1990s, is how they represent a new - and overlooked - chapter in the history of abstraction. When I look at the images from that time, I see abstraction: they’re very pixelated, they use minimal color palettes, they attempt to represent a sky, a mountain, an ocean with a visual language that pertains to abstraction. These attempts to represent natural forces and landscapes through screen-based abstract graphics have stayed with me ever since: not for what they refer to in terms of time period, but for what they create in terms of visual experience.
After graduating from art school, I decided to explore the history of computer graphics from that era, to find out where these pixelated patterns came from. I believe this visual language exists beyond its time, in conversation with other visual languages and art forms: with the history of abstraction, the history of kinetic art, the history of experimental video works. I’m much more interested in this aesthetic for the connections it establishes with other art forms and lived experiences, rather than something self-referential.
What were the most important influences in your development of this aesthetic?
My biggest influences have always been early computer graphics and natural environments. The work of Bridget Riley and Jesús Rafael-Soto has also been very inspirational in my practice, in particular for their respective research on how to mediate experiences of nature and landscapes through kinetic, interactive, and optical art forms. The video works of Steina and Woody Vasulka have also been influential. In a recent interview with The New York Times, they described their piece “Noise Fields” (1974) as creating an experience that is similar to staring into a fire. I love this metaphor because it speaks to the visceral attraction we have for screens, for their “signal”. That’s something I often think about with my screen-based practice.
My experiences installing projections for underground music events in Vancouver have also been very influential from 2010 onwards. It’s been an incredible space for artistic experimentations, friendships and collaborations that has fed my art practice and my life in general.
Could you tell us more about the tools you use in making these works? Your practice has a very craft-based dimension that distinguishes you in the field.
In art school, I was quite envious of painters and the “craftsmanship” dimension of their practice – there is such a rich or longstanding tradition for painters, whereas for digital artists, we can be influenced by these practices but are also drawing on many different fields, like video editing, computer programming, digital photography. I was really longing to create something similar for myself, adjusted to a digital workflow. After graduating, I decided to completely rethink my practice on those terms: I wanted to have a set-up I could use on the go, using tools that are readily accessible.
I’ve always been a terrible programmer, but I love working with image-editing software and I have extensive knowledge of programs like Photoshop. So, I started researching how to replicate early computer graphics using a visual-based approach rather than a code-based approach. I began to realize that the graphics I was trying to replicate have always been an essential part of most image-editing programs. My practice probably uses less than 5% of the functionality of these software, but with this reduced palette, I can re-appropriate the rich visuality and style of early computer graphics.
From 2008 to 2012 I was mostly dedicated to shaping my own visual language. At first, I used this language to create sketches for sculptures or installations. Instead of drawing on paper, I would draw animations and computer drawings. Eventually, this drawing and animation practice led me to define a particular visual language for all of my practice.
As you have already mentioned, the second major inspiration for your show in London is water and liquid motion. Water can manifest a diversity of shapes and movements: waves, vortices, cascades, and falls. In the history of art, it holds a number of meanings. Water is one of the oldest metaphors for change. But it can also signify purity, tranquility or the unknown. What associations does it evoke for you?
The primary reason why I am so fascinated with liquid motions is my upbringing and all the activities I’ve done related to the ocean. Whenever I work on abstract animations, I try to generate visual elements that remind me of atmospheric forces, and I often think of digital abstraction in relation to memory. Memory is constituted by details or fragments: one fragment can be the sensation of the wind, another can be the movement of water, another can be the heat of the sun. When making abstract animations, I think of these specific textures and motions as traces or memories — ephemeral impressions which appear and disappear.
I also often think of water, or being by a body of water, as something related to memories. The ocean defines a landscape that I have lived very close to for most of my life. And when you live by the ocean, it becomes a space of contemplation that invites you to think of many things: life, the past, the transience of everything. If anything, Waterfalls is a project which tries to emulate such a space for contemplation. Water is also constantly flowing, which I can’t help but see as a strong connection to animation.
The idea of retrieving memories of nature within digital abstraction is fascinating. Could you say more about how this influences your setup of the exhibition space?
When installing my work in a space, I always try to think of physical reference points in terms of sensory experience. How to translate the qualities of a screen-based experience into a physical space? Which formats, analogies, and scales would help to translate this experience?
If you display an artwork on a small screen in a gallery, the experience is going to be radically different from the experience you have of the same work on your laptop. In fact, the experience of a screen-based work on your laptop is a very intimate experience: it’s somewhat similar or comparable to a theatrical experience, but even more intimate because you’re alone. There is nothing between you and the screen. Now, if you take this artwork into a gallery, the experience changes drastically: there is bright light, a lot of people around you, you become acutely aware of yourself in the space and it becomes much more difficult to focus on a screen.
When trying to address this challenge, I’ve found that scaling installations to human architecture and creating low-light environments are great ways to generate the type of experiences I’m aiming for. If you scale the display of an animation to an entire wall, you reduce the heightened self-awareness of the gallery space, and the experience of the work becomes more immersive. It’s still very different from experiencing a work on your own personal screen but it creates a form of continuity. It’s a sort of in-between space: between the theatrical space and the exhibition space. When you scale a work to such an extent, it can also create an interesting dialogue with the architecture in context.
Another theme that was important for your exhibition in London is the idea of the “screen as a window,” which determines the minimalist exhibition design as well as the landscape format of the screens in the Soho Square gallery. Could you elaborate on the idea of the window, which has such a rich history in painting, for your understanding of digital artworks?
The metaphor of the window has been very influential in the history of art, first in painting, then in photography and film, and now in different forms of digital art. This metaphor has always fascinated me for its contemplative nature, its link to memory, and how screen-based artworks extend it to another level. Our experiences of computers and user interfaces are also built around the metaphor of the window - different spaces that we explore and navigate - a good example of this is “Microsoft Windows”.
When I first published my works online, the laptop screen was the window to experience the work, a “portable” window with no particular context. With physical exhibitions, screens and projections become windows in the context of an architecture. Projections can appear in a physical space like an added layer to the space’s architecture: light-based windows and doorways “magically” appearing in the space. Screens can operate in a similar way, and the way I use large screens is guided by this notion of a window, an opening into another space.
It’s always essential to be cognizant of the space itself, of its qualities, of the way people circulate in it. This is an aspect of my work that I really love: finding the right site-specific set-up for the space. For the exhibition in London, this will be important: having the works appear in such a way that they feel like windows, contemplative opening towards the Waterfalls.
Thank you so much for sharing these thoughts. In conclusion, I would like to take a step back and ask you how you first came into the NFT space. What differentiates it from the “traditional” contemporary art system, which you have worked in for many years?
I minted my first NFT in February 2021. A few months prior to that, I had been contacted by Foundation and SuperRare to join their platforms, but it took me some time to dive into NFTs. I took some time to research and educate myself. In January 2021, I started seeing familiar artists minting their first NFTs, it was the final push I needed to enter the space. It has been a life-changing experience ever since: it also feels a little bit like jumping on a high-speed train, but then the train never stops…
Until 2021, I would always work on several solo shows a year as well as many group exhibitions. It was absolutely necessary to exist artistically, to be seen. 18 months later, I feel extremely fortunate because now I can be very selective about the shows I want to participate in. The NFT space still feels very young, and what will be exciting in the coming years is to see how individual artists and galleries like Bright Moments can articulate NFTs in exhibition spaces. This is also something that will bring more conversations with the “traditional” art world and its exhibition history.
In the last 15 years, working in the contemporary art system has been a constant battle to secure the right conditions for exhibiting digital art. Whether it’s a small gallery or a large institution, it is often a struggle to get the right screens and projectors to show your work properly. We live in a world surrounded by screens, yet many cultural institutions fail to consider this radical change in terms of how we experience art today. This, I hope, will change in the coming years, with more exhibition projects like the ones Bright Moments is doing.
