Interview with Pavel Smetana
Pavel Smetana was born in Ústí nad Labem, Bohemia. From 1979-1982 he studied at the Arts and Crafts School in the Prague Žižkov neighborhood. He was not accepted to the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague because of political reasons, which was one of the reasons why he decided to leave for France in 1984. In Paris he studied at the École Nationale Superieure des Arts Décoratifs (1984-1989) with specialization in “Art-Espace”. At first he was engaged in abstract painting, creating oil paintings but also images using tar and asphalt. Another image cycle was made by rubbing canal covers on canvas. He exhibited his paintings at a one-man show in the Saint-Germain Des Prés gallery in Paris in 1991. Pavel Smetana’s artwork has been from its beginning aimed towards monumental creations: he is author of various large-format wall-paintings in public space (for example, the Paris Saint-Lazare train station in 1987 or painting on the Concorde, the first supersonic passenger aircraft, in 1989). He has also created mobile sculptures and decorations for ballet performances. He had began to deal with Video and Computer Art at school, influenced by Don Foresta, pedagogue and theoretician of media art who founded the first Video Department in Europe in 1976 there.
Since the beginning of the 1990s Pavel Smetana has been artistically experimenting in the field of digital interactive media, creating installations “The Room of Desires”, “The Mirror”, “ The Cyber-Portrait of Dorian Gray” and “Lilith”. Since 2003 he directed several multimedia performances, interconnecting science, contemporary dance and game technologies.
Pavel was during past ten years Professor of 3D, VR and Art at the National Art Institute in Aix-en-Provence, France and Director of the International Festival ENTERmultimediale (2000, 2005, 2007) in Prague.
Currently he is director of CIANT, also functions as National coordinator of the international mobility programs and expert in art/science program in EU.
More: http://www.smetana.cz
FiveWordsForTheFuture - Dec 27, 2016 | Art, Consciousness, Globalization, Information Technology, Innovation, News, Technologies, Video
Tagged | art and science, body, Information technologies, innovation, society
RSS - Posts
FiveWordsForTheFuture nasce per aiutare a riconoscere e capire l'innovazione, a immaginare il futuro nel senso di pensarsi in un tempo possibile, prossimo e concreto.
FiveWordsForTheFuture has been realized to help people in identifying and understanding innovation. Its aim is to imagine Our Future, through an inquiry into its concrete possibilities and by looking forward to those next, near realities that are going to come.
