Associação Cultural Videobrasil

There is no art without technology

Michel Bret's route is hybrid: he studies mathematics and is a painter as well. Does a lot of oil painting. He has been travelling the world for seven years. "If you want to know a place, you have to work there", he says. He teaches mathematics and paints. Exhibits his works and sells some of them. Returning to france in 1975, he makes his first contact with a computer at Paris VIII University. This is the light: the perfect combination of mathematics and painting.

Technique in first place. Like any other subject, technique is a must. "In order to have something done, it's necessary to know something", he confirms, "all painters once were technicians. Even though we think the artistic side must predominate over the technical one, things such as drawing or choosing pigments have to be learned. So let's work on and I started learning. The avaiable softwares in the market such as Explore, Alias or Warefront, produce gorgeous flat images which are options like any other one, but limit the artist to the same pattern. Then, seeking a personal stile, I tried developing my own tools. I used languages similar to the operational system which allow the addition of lines in the program til the infinity, making your dream come true. But these languages are inexorable: if we leave one parenthesis behind, everything fails. Bugs and I were a lot together.

"If you blot and want to wipe it out, you think: This is fantastic!… and soon you enlarge it and the pictures changes. A Bug, meaning mistake in computer language, can be creative. It's only necessary to orientable it for the media, develop it, control it; otherwise, it is only a physical mistake failing everything. I have a very pratical relationship with technology. For me, it is a clay or marble for a scuptor, or as canvas and pigments for a painter. To make electronic images require more than machines, something has to be done with your own hands. It's necessary to manufacture, to shape the nature, to do physical things. Technology is the hard side of creation. There is no art without technology. There is no thought without words. After all, even poets write texts.

It's of great urgency for Michel Bret to demystify the tool. Computer is not a god, but only a machine capable of revealing ourselves. A recent study verified that children with scholar or social barries progressed when using computers because their barries or inhibitions were origineted from difficult psychological relations with teachers and relatives. The machine has nothing to do either with psychology or affection. When a mistake is done you have to solve the problem. The machine doesn't know love.

Michel Bret hopes ome day the artist will use his instrument for something else; otherwise, only imitations will be done with our machines. Actually, there is no freedom of creation. "Freedom of creation is given different purposes to things despite the reason why they were created for", fe confirms, "rules are made to be bronen". This is poetry. There are many histories in my work. A history is logical, a joke is logical, and they obviously exist to mean something else. I can't say what something else is. We see, we feel. If I said, it would only be another trick to say another thing. I think computer art synthetic images have great prospects, not with standing the art critics silence. They haven't seen the beginning of impressionism in the 19^th Century. Today they make the same mistake, but it's natural. Nevertheless, I think computer art will surprise us with the barely known new techniques: the virtual realities will create a radical rupture to the traditional forms of representation. Maybe the work will not exist anymore, the original concept tends to desappear. It puts the artists in the game. He won't pose anymore as an artist with capital A. My trips allowed me to see the relativity of all these things. My relation with the world is very strong. I'm very curious regarding this world. Whoever wants to satisfy ones curiosity has to go down deep on it. When we open our eyes we see nothing, there is nothing to be seen. We have to make up what we want to see. Everything is on our minds.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "9th Videobrasil International Festival": 21st to 27th September 1992, pp.56-57, São Paulo, Brazil, 1992.