PARIS GALAXIES
a Vision for the Greater Paris
 Future research about the making of the Great Paris in 2030

 An experimental project developed by LIID, attached to Institute ACTE (Sorbonne University),
awarded the Paris 2030 research grant (City of Paris)
in collaboration with Paris College of Art and emerging actors of the creative metropolis.
Greater Paris representations and « Parties Prises »

A bank of images collected online by the Paris Galaxies research team, complements the creative hotspots database, in order to later illustrate the online map (due in 2015) that will reveal the Greater Paris creative constellation.
A selection of these images was also shown “exploded” in the “Parties Prises” (to be translated as both “parts” and “position” being taken) project developed by French artist Lia Rochas in the spring 2014. Designed as a “portable exhibition” gathering about thirty artists, Parties Prises is an un-bound large format publication that can easily circulate and be exhibited. As a deliberately “post-internet” art experiment, each artist proposition had to result from computer screen capture, where multiple images would stand as parallel windows on the virtual world.

See project website: http://www.partiesprises.com

Raphaële Bidault-Waddington-ImpressionParisGalaxiesBIG


The “Impression Paris Galaxies” image (above), composed of 300 hotspot views, thus gave a vision of the creative constellation in several dimensions (“impression” in French means a sensation but also a print), while making a wink at the Parisian Impressionist heritage, here revisited via the web and giving yet another inaccurate image of reality.
In fact, representing visually the Greater Paris area and spirit has proven a complicated task and LIID’s team has made other researches and creative experiences in that regard.

 

Students for the “Cultural Projects in the Public Space” Master at Sorbonne University, were asked, during a (too short) workshop in March 2014, to create, using Scoop.it online platform, palettes of images to represent the creative constellation of the Greater Paris, without good results.


The lack of (creative) representation of the Greater Paris was also pinpointed during a discussion by Jean-Yves Lepinay, director of the Forum des Images in Paris, which had organized in July 2013 a cycle of projections about the Greater Paris Imaginary, including a selection of films from various periods. If Paris and its current suburb have their own distinctive images and films, none give a perception of a common imaginary.

 

Bublex-GPProjet@Vallois

 

“Contributions”, Alain Bublex photographic project, Galerie Vallois, Paris, 2011.

 

Another noteworthy experience is the “Greater Paris” photographic project by artist Alain Bublex (exhibited at gallery Vallois in Paris in 2011), whose creative protocol consisted in assembling photographs taken at each of the 237 RER train stations of metropolis. Very abstract, the resulting panorama of image fails to show the Greater Paris reality, which is in fact still a very abstract concept for many. In that sense, this artwork is highly significant of the invisible dimension of the Greater Paris. As a matter of fact, one of the aims of the Paris Galaxies project is to reveal these hidden and/or immaterial realities of the Greater Paris and to integrate intangible dimensions in its urban methodological model.
See article “Paris Galaxies, a vision for the Greater Paris”

See oligoptic approach chosen in “Paris Galaxies in Perspective, aesthetic audit critical report”.