Following last year tradition with "L'homme et la machine" (2022) and Generative Nano S+ collection (2021), this year I've gone a step further by crafting 144 unique physical postcards offered to my colleagues at Ledger (distributed to Paris, Vierzon, London and Portland offices).
They all form this physical animation: https://objkt.com/asset/KT1AZYsEjt8HFEXWZUjGVfBxtzKPobNo3x1t/16
This project is an artistic interpretation of videos from the Ledger commercial featuring the Ledger Nano X. The artwork is physically realized by using pen plotting with white gel on black paper. I have created a video by compiling the 144 frames of the plot, using the stop-motion animation technique.
The medium used is fascinating as it represents an organic and analog process. In this process, everything is made with strokes, and I have taken creative liberty to map the video pixels into lines using my algorithm "Worms filling" (this algorithm mimics the movement of worms navigating through food, representing areas where color is needed). Additionally, this method produces an electric arc effect, which aptly inspired the project's name, "Electric wallets."
At the bottom, each frame features a small binary pager, indicating its unique number.
To give an idea of the intense involvement of this artwork, here is an approximative time and cost of this project. Of course, I'm leveraging on many of my past experience, experiments and on my pen plotters machine (which itself have important fixed costs).
- Development: roughly 5 hours. (leveraging on lot of past experiments)
- Pen plotting time: roughly 36 hours (in total). There are 18 sheets to produce and each takes approximatively 2 hours to plot. A sheet is a A3 grid of 8 postcards.
- Pen costs: about 10 Sakura gel pens were used. (approx 3€ each)
- Paper costs: 18 Fabriano A3 black paper were used. (approx 1.10€ each)
- Digitalisation time: roughly 8 hours. I had to photograph each sheet, manually crop and align the 144 images to make back the video. Then I had to cut them all physically. This is taking a lot of time.
That means in total:
- 49 hours of work
- 50€ of material costs
The project was creating in November 2023.