The relationship between music and power always interested me.

I’m a big fan of the Downhill Battle, Evolution Control Committee, Illegal Art and by extension, the Yes Men and ®TM just to mention a few.

I was doing some researches concerning the music industry and the copyright some years ago.

One day, I discovered a text taken from a book which was sent to my blog.

This text was telling us the exact story of the “Happy Birthday” song: where was it written, when it was written, who wrote it, and in what context?

I was inspired by this text to make this video, but what most interested me in this almost “Hollywood” story was to see the development of the copyrights over time.

“Happy Birthday” is no doubt one of the most well-known songs on the whole world, but it is still protected by copyrights which brings in millions of dollars to its owners.

After a long period of silence, I decided to make a new post and show one of my latest works.

Last summer, we were talking with a friend who graduated from art school and she suddenly said that we were not all supposed to be a part of history, by doing amazing artworks and such.

This was a great relief for me, because I always thought art in general shouldn’t be that pretentious and it was a great way to say it.

It was also interesting to hear that, because she was supposing that we were bound to be a part of history no matter what we do by affirming the opposite in a way - the negative affirms the existance of the positive at the same time, otherwise it would be absurd.

I wanted to find a way to materialise this idea in order to share with the others.

I’ve always been very inspired by text and simple typography in artworks and graphical design in general: I thought that was an interesting answer to contemporary visual display landscapes which are oftenly way too agressive and overloaded (the same way minimalism emerged as a reaction against the painterly forms of abstract expressionism as well as the discourse, institutions and ideologies that supported it).

I also had the opportunity to attend to a lecture done by Experimental Jetset in Valence a couple of months ago and it was a revelation to hear them talk about their work.

I started studying Christopher Wool’s paintings, how he is creating a perpetual tension between painting and removing, as well as the work of Liam Gillick and especially how he would use text in simple typography in his works and reviewed Felix Gonzales-Torres‘ stacks of paper, unlimited edition prints, free for the viewer to take, which inspired me for an upcoming project.

All these reflections led me to create this white elusive sentence to claim this point of view.

It’s been fifteen years since “Nevermind” was released and still, it continues to reign over the majority of the turntables of the Grunge generation, as well as contemporary teenagers, even if they were born too late to catch the phenomenon while it was alive and happening.

It took three albums and a compilation of rare tracks to conquer the world and Cobain became an icon of its time, a will of what were a few years of fury, an ultimate revolt, a punk startle at the dawn of the nineties.

Before committing suicide, Cobain had declared that he was no longer able to entertain neihter himself nor the public on stage.

He judged the situation of being unfair towards the fans and he wanted to stop playing live shows.

“Frances Farmer’s Revenge” is the ultimate track, a tribute to one of the most exciting and influenceing bands of the nineties: all of Nirvana’s tracks from the three albums released while Kurt Cobain was still alive (i.e. Bleach, Nevermind & In Utero), compressed into one long opaque wall of sound, moaning simultaneously.

Fifteen years after the explosion, the smoke’s still around.

This is a first part of an eventual installation series in which I wanted to isolate images from their original context and reconsider their meanings.

When I was working on this installation, I was very much interested about the hierarchical power distribution over the world wide web. I wanted to know about who gets the most of the clicks.

I learned from various sources that porn-related sites were dominating the Internet: all roads might lead to Rome, but all the links were leading to porn.

Therefore, I wanted to create an icon as a testimony of gratitude to the industry, celebrating the pornographic conglomerate.

In this case, an icon refers to be generally a flat panel painting depicting a holy being or object.

I started to look in these sites, in order to understand what might attract people to visit them, besides bareness and sex. I tried to understand the structure, how these sites were build, thinking it might be useful to understand how one of the most powerful commercial tools worked.

While visiting these sites, I was attracted by some of the actresses’ gestures myself, not because they were simply erotic or pornographic, but they were something “ecstatic” once taken out of their context.

The term of “ecstatic” refers to “religious ecstasy”, which is defined as a state characterized by greatly reduced external awareness and expanded interior mental and spiritual awareness which is frequently accompanied by visions and emotional/intuitive (and sometimes physical) euphoria.

These pictures were making me think of some of the most well-known Renaissance’s paintings, such as The Spoliation of El Greco or Spasimo by Raphael.

On the other hand, we know that the word “ecstasy” is often used in milder sense, to refer to any heightened state of consciousness or intense positive emotional experience (spontaneous or induced, for example, by meditation, creative activity, aesthetic or sexual experiences or use of psychoactive drugs).

Having this ambiguity and these similarities in mind, I decided to build a computer-designed bitmap-formatted icon using one of these found-images, which is my subjective answer to an eventual contemporary flat panel painting of a certain mythical holy being’s representation, a figure of adoration.

This is the pattern I made for Naked & Angry.

Naked & Angry exists to create high quality products from patterns submitted and chosen by the brand’s audience.

If my pattern gets enough votes, it will be massively manufactured into a high-quality-mind-blowing product, such as a shirt, a tie, or even a wallpaper.

Please take a minute or two to vote and make me rich and famous.

click + click + click

doomsday.argument is an online countdown based on a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the future lifetime of the human race given only an estimate of the total number of humans born so far.

The current doomsday argument’s conclusion is a 95% chance of extinction within 9120 years.

It gives a 5% chance that humans will still be thriving circa 11125 AD.

This website is counting down seconds left until the 1st of January 11125.

A complete definition of doomsday argument can be found here.

take.time.to.think is a project I did in 2005 while I was an intern at TBWA\Brussels.

I was very often asked to do research on the Internet during my internship.

I was in front of a computer screen, constantly looking for various information.

I remarked that when you work full time in a computer-assisted environment, you barely have time to take a break and think about things.

Therefore, I had this idea of building a website where you can take a 5 minute-break whenever you wish while you’re online, and think about whatever you want even if you can’t leave your workstation.