Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your work, and how video games fit into it?

Alix Desaubliaux - In my work as a visual artist, I use video games as a medium, I modify it, I take samples from it, I think of it as a film set and I draw representations from its characters and blind spots, I draw inspiration from its atmospheres. I see it as a collaboration, sometimes with the game characters, sometimes with the game itself: I'm never in total control, and I have to bend to the hazards it throws at me, whether narrative, environmental or simply technical. I work with 3D as well as video, image, VR, sometimes within my own immersive and interactive environments, or even in ceramics.

What was your approach to this project? What aspect(s) of video games did you want to highlight?

A.D. - I've always been fascinated by the representation of nature in games, whether it's highly detailed, exhaustively depicted, fleeting or an antagonistic figure for the player. In Une odyssée de l'existence, I approach it through a poetic and meditative inquiry. I always ask myself the question of how the creatures and inhabitants of a game exist. Wild animals, enemies, 3D meshes, scripts, animations... but how do they relate to the player's affect, or that of anyone who happens to traverse the game? What link can exist, other than that forged by the game's scenario and the “purpose” for which they are drawn, with human beings?