Romain Tardy
Born in Paris in 1984, Romain Tardy graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Mans. Alongside his artistic studies, he learns digital arts techniques through self study, using computer forums. He begins to practise VJing in 2004, firstly as an amateur and then professionally: until June 2011, he creates using the pseudonym Aalto. In 2007-2008, he co-founds the AntiVJ label with Yannick Jacquet, Joanie Lemercier and Olivier Ratsi, and plays an active part there until 2014. It was through this label (which works as a collective) that Romain Tardy carries out his first experiments with mapping. Today, Romain Tardy works in the field of light installation in the broadest sense, by combining techniques. Romain Tardy's interest in mapping stems from a critical perspective vis-à-vis the digital and ‘virtual’ worlds — his installations Défilé [Ndlt: procession] presented at the Prague Opera in 2013, and Je rate mon cerveau pré-internet [Ndlt: I ruin my brain before the internet] at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva for the 2015 Mapping Festival are the perfect examples of this approach. For Romain Tardy, mapping is a means to materialise the virtual, rather than virtualise the material. He seeks to use architecture and public spaces to give substance to digital images, to turn them into a concrete, shared and re-politicised experience.
Romain Tardy : Pagan - Toulouse, 2012.