Adrien Mondot & Claire Bardainne -"Mirages & Miracles"

Mirages & Miracles is a 2020 exhibition featuring AR and VR by French artists Adrien Mondot & Claire Bardainne. Working at the “crossroads of artistic refinement and immersive technology,” Mirages & Miracles. ’ [1] Fourteen installations blend VR, AR, holograms and video projections resulting in a combination of fields of combines technology, art and poetry. [2] The combination of these fields in turn creates a “universe full of lyricism” that explores digital craft, natural phenomena and living visual art. [3]

Occurring during Montreal’s confinement within the global covid pandemic of 2020, Monodot and Bardainne in partnership with PHI , transitioned the exhibition to an online tour format. I like to give particular attention to the audio of this online tour, in which Claire Bardainne talks through the idea of the exhbition, as it highly aligns with the intentions of my own work:

“Mirages & Miracles. Today we offer you a chance to observe the invisible. To open a dialogue between concrete and imaginary…Mirages & Miracles is a series of installations…blending digital and handmade art. Mirages & Miracles presents to us a set of improbable scenarios, dancing on the boundary between real and false, between animate and inanimate. Authenticity and imposture, poetry, magic, the fantastic and the inconceivable…..

...The iPad as a tool enable the virtual universe to superimpose against reality by allowing the precise coincidence at several points of virtual and real representations. One can become an extension of the other, giving rise to sensation and emotion…The distinction between material and immaterial becomes furtive, fragile and progressively blends into perception. The boundary between the two dissolves. Together they occupy a single space." [4]

What interests me in miracles and mirages is the combination of different representations within space - virtual and physical - how they become closer- extensions of one another - this idea is really reminiscent of the idea of spectrums I have been discussing in relationship to Donna Haraway and Rosalind Krauss. I'm interested in how Adrien Mondot & Claire Bardainne curate mini sections, moments or relationships between things within the installation and how these moments creation conflations between fiction/non fiction.

[1] - "Mirages & Miracles: An exhibition-experience presented for the first time in North America," PHI, https://phi.ca/en/studio/, accessed 24 November.

[2] - "Mirages & Miracles: An exhibition-experience presented for the first time in North America," PHI, https://phi.ca/en/studio/, accessed 24 November.

[3] - "Mirages & Miracles: An exhibition-experience presented for the first time in North America," PHI, https://phi.ca/en/studio/, accessed 24 November.

[4] - "Mirages & Miracles: An exhibition-experience presented for the first time in North America," PHI, https://phi.ca/en/studio/, accessed 24 November.

[5] - https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2019/07/15/miragesmiracles/