Flying Lands by Lionel Bayol-Themines

Untitled, from the series Flying Lands, 2014. © Lionel Bayol-Themines.

Editor’s Note: This feature was originally published on our previous platform, In the In-Between: Journal of Digital Imaging Artists, and the formatting has not been optimized for the new website.

Statement:

For many years, photography has been seen as a representation of the natural world. Today, information captured by a camera can be changed by playing with the information given to the algorithm in Photoshop. Beginning with a standard digital image, I select several portions of the image as layers, and alter them using various Photoshop 3-D tools.  The individual selections of clouds, rocks, trees and et cetera become new images, which are then re-integrated into the original.  This method of creating a picture within a picture is my way of questioning the nature of image-making and highlighting the ability of digital photography to generate other realities.

I’m inspired by artists such as Joan Fontcuberta, who explores the fact and the fictions in photography, and Vilém Flusser, a philosopher who questioned the story and the process of creating images. With these influences I built a nature where the real and virtual worlds are in a symbiotic, bringing these two areas to coexist, as these two representations always surround us.  Now, the evolution of digital technologies allows the creation of these new images, question this new space of representation that is the virtual world, this new code created by humans.

Untitled, from the series Flying Lands, 2014. © Lionel Bayol-Themines.

Untitled, from the series Flying Lands, 2014. © Lionel Bayol-Themines.

Untitled, from the series Flying Lands, 2014. © Lionel Bayol-Themines.

Untitled, from the series Flying Lands, 2014. © Lionel Bayol-Themines.

Untitled, from the series Flying Lands, 2014. © Lionel Bayol-Themines.

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Bio:

Lionel Bayol-Themines is a visual artist who lives and works in Paris. he’s been a permanent resident of the National Foundation for Graphic and Plastic Arts (FNAGP ) in Paris, France, since 2004.

Over the past twenty years, Lionel has been exploring the progress of our societies through a fictional anthropology. His artistic research focuses on human relationships to history and environment, as in the series Typology of human language and Empty land ...

Today, by mixing digital photography technologies and 3D creation (Utopian Builder and Code project), Lionel Bayol-Themines is building a new reality where the real and the virtual coexist symbiotically.