AT SPEED

Real-time 3D application, 2023 — Samuel Bianchini. Real-time 3D developer: Colin Bouvry. Motion capture specialist: Anastasiia Ternova. 3D graphics assistant: Dylan Egu. Curation: Abbaye de Maubuisson, contemporary art centre. Production: Conseil départemental du Val d’Oise. With thanks to Mathis Barelle, Jean Dellac, Jean-Pierre Guillaume, Vincent Guttmann, Isabelle Landry-Quinette, Erwan Le Guennec, Marie Menestrier, Morgan Morizet, Sibylle Roquebert, Liya Tetka, Hanieh Yekta and Arnaud Zumaglia.

How do you represent a human body from its data alone? And, since the subject is an athlete, which data should be kept, and how should it be put to work? “En Vitesses” takes the form of a computer-generated moving image. Against a black background, an athlete performs actions common to many sports: running, jumping, dodging, engaging, disengaging.

The image is legible, and yet it is figured entirely in white typographic signs — digits. They give shape to the different parts of the body and, at the same time, allow its speed to be expressed: its speeds. The digits scroll according to the movement through space of the body part they embody. The image so formed inherits, as closely as it can, the data of a real body, a captured body.

Its movement was recorded in order to transpose it into a generic, generated body — a 3D model faithful to the morphology of the original body but entirely reconstituted by a computer. The image is henceforth hybrid: forged and governed by data drawn from tangible reality, yet generated by a real-time video-game 3D engine. It figures an encounter, that of sport and e-sport.

And it asks us whether our bodies and our actions can be translated into numbers this way, in the age of the “quantified self”, as our data carries more and more value. En Vitesses, Samuel Bianchini, 2023. Exhibition “Entraînement à l’image”, Centre Départemental de Formation et d’Animation Sportives (CDFAS), Eaubonne, September 2023. Photographs: © Samuel Bianchini – ADAGP.