Rico da halvarez

He works both images and text as well as sounds, from a medium, the algorithms of the computer code. Profuse work, demanding and confusing as his, to those who are not familiar with the Net Art. Diversion, derision, invention, would be some of the key words of his artistic quest, all crowned with a good dose of mischief:

“Why not have Duchamp and the Monty Python as a reference? "

Я ا☪⚉ ḍḁ ㅒ Д╰ṽᴬ®Е☡ is the demiurge of a plastic and poetic universe in perpetual change and expansion of which, like a puppeteer, he pulls the threads, and which, today, develops mainly on the Net.

During his studies in philosophy, he founded in Bordeaux in 1993 with other artists - he was then 20 years old - an underground collective named vna.trc?, acronym of " Still Haven't Understood? », Which occurs not only in public places, but also in contemporary art institutions, such as the CAPC – Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, and in galleries.

Its ambition, through committed and offbeat, even provocative, artistic actions and gestures is to question the passer-by, the spectator or the visitor to a museum or exhibition: the " plastic attacks ", the " museum parasite ", the " polishing Are just a few of them.

In 1997, the artists of vna.trc? write the founding text of their conception of art, De catena legenda labyrinthorum artis i-machinantis.

The collective frequently uses pseudonyms and acronyms in its texts, a custom which Я ا☪⚉ ḍḁ ㅒ Д╰ṽᴬ®Е☡ in the titles of his digital works: YATAST, YASFT, YASFADT, ... so many nods to the configuration tool YAST (Yet Another Setup Tool) one of the operating systems used by the artist.

If the use of pseudonyms and acronyms is part of the culture of the Net, it draws from other sources, artistic and literary, where we also find a number of titles in Latin. Я ا☪⚉ ḍḁ ㅒ Д╰ṽᴬ®Е☡ indeed claims other influences:

Dada, the College of Pataphysics, whose organization evokes that of the collective, and one of its emanations,
theOrLiPo, acronym for “Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle”, this group founded by Raymond Queneau in 1961 who wanted to apply the techniques and rigor of mathematics to literary creation.

In the titles and comments, we find digital works by Я ا☪⚉ ḍḁ ㅒ Д╰ṽᴬ®Е☡ the same taste for the exploration of language and singular lexicons. He plays with the mixture of letters, numbers, typographical signs and logograms, visually recognizable but almost unpronounceable words, becoming enigmatic.

The plastic activity of Я ا☪⚉ ḍḁ ㅒ Д╰ṽᴬ®Е☡ goes hand in hand with musical practice. In 2004 he founded theassociation Musique Libre! which archives more than 50 titles, the fruit of musical research from around the world, and which campaigns for their distribution under a free license; he will take care of it until 000. As a bassist, he composes himself, using the instrument and the computer, and sometimes adds to the digital work, a musical work (Exposure , Brazzaville, June 2015). He realised several albums and gave concerts in France and abroad (Berlin, Brussels, Mexico, Austria, ...)

In 2000, Я ا☪⚉ ḍḁ ㅒ Д╰ṽᴬ®Е☡ abandons multimedia and collective actions to devote himself to his own creation. The vnatrc.net site is born which marks its entry into Net Art, an initiative led with another artist, bituur esztreym, with whom he collaborates until today. He then designed his first moving images on the Net.

For 15 years now, he has been producing digital works that he has grouped together in a group called , in reference to the main computer language he uses, HTML, usually used to create web pages, and which he has misused for artistic purposes. Its signature itself is written in code and includes, in its middle, the motif of the flag of Tunisia, a discreet graphic index of its Franco-Tunisian identity.

« HTML is my brush box, with the colors » he explains. The design of algorithms and their implementation in the computer constitute the two highlights of the creative act: these instructions buried in the heart of the machine predetermine the elements that will then appear on the screen, buttons, radio buttons (HTML language), letters and numbers, photos, their respective size, quantity and composition, colors. It is also programmed to master the process of degradation of the images which will be “attacked” by various processes modifying the colors and the pixels, and the tempo of their iteration, from one hour to two days.

The digital works of Я ا☪⚉ ḍḁ ㅒ Д╰ṽᴬ®Е☡ are indeed caught in a continuous movement of transformation, unpredictable and always renewed. The very large number of elements mobilized (10000 to 15000) makes almost impossible to have the same composition twice. The artist decides when and where to stop the iteration of the work and which screenshot to keep for printing. "What is original is the copy", he comments, playing with humor this conflicting relationship that has always haunted the history of art. Each printed work is unique. But it presupposes the existence of a almost infinite number of variations produced by the computer which, if not chosen, disappear forever.

The aesthetic universe of his works associates a magma ofHTML code elements, words and fragments of sentences, pairings of dissimilar typographical characters, with a very wide chromatic spectrum (approximately 20 colors), a search for contrasts between shadows, blurring - carried by photography - and the hypernettity of code elements.

More recently, it is to the text that he applies this principle by using Twitter, in such a way as to pervert its primary, informative, even alienating function, and to transform it into a tool of “perplexed propaganda”. This takes the form of sentences gleaned randomly from the web or from the founding text of vna.trc? (From catena legenda labyrinthorum artis i-machinantis), and lines of code elements, spellings that invite the reader to engage in the game of decryption. It is distributed by « BOTS », accounts that automatically tweet, to which the artist gave the names of characters from By catena, such as, among the most mysterious: @Wlobsterhulwicz, @astreegalbiatta, @Afalistolec. A world in itself.

Я ا☪⚉ ḍḁ ㅒ Д╰ṽᴬ®Е☡ defines his practice as that of a "Art in freedom".
For each image, it delegates to the computer the role of managing the random return of certain elements. The machine takes charge of the creation of these visual worlds: “The artist gives her the score: she sets it to music. " This collaboration of technology at birth on the screen of ever new images contributes to the effect of fascination they exert on our imagination.

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