Audience Works

artist's book and display box for touching, 2013
Samuel Bianchini
Produced and published in 2013 by mfc-michèle didier

Vol 1: 198 x 297 mm, 208 pages
Vol 2: 139,7 x 209,5 mm, 192 pages
Volumes inserted in a slipcase
Limited edition of 100 numbered and signed copies
Produced and published in 2013 by mfc-michèle didier
© 2013 Samuel Bianchini and mfc-michèle didier
With support from the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR), France
and MESHS-CNRS (Maison européenne des sciences de l’homme et de la société, Lille)
in the framework of the research project PRATICABLES
and the Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques, France.
website: http://www.micheledidier.com

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Audience Works, Samuel Bianchini, 2013
exhibition at mfc-michèle didier gallery, Paris from January to March, 2013
Photographs: © Samuel Bianchini - ADAGP

Audience Works, mfc-michèle didier latest publication, is an artist’s book that takes an interest in its own audience. Seventeen interactive installations, produced by Samuel Bianchini between 1999 and 2012, are here considered with the rigorous precision scientists are known for. The 17 works that are investigated are: Sniper, Ta garde (Keep Your Guard Up), D’autant qu’à plusieurs (What’s More with Many), seul à seul (one-on-one), Jeux pOlymiques (pOlymic Games), Temps libre (Free Time), Contretemps, Training Center, Rappel (Encore), REANIMATION*, Sirène (siren)*, Tous ensemble (All Together), niform, Valeurs croisées (Crossing Values), Discontrol Party, À Distances (Distances) and Qui-vive (On the qui vive). The study concentrates exclusively on the audience, which is both watching and activating the work at the same time. Parallel to the creation of these installations, the artist, who is also a teacher-researcher, has here documented through photography how the audience acts on his works, in order to formulate Audience Works, an individual work on its own.

Audience Works proposes a series of photographs shot by Samuel Bianchini who has taken a important number of pictures of the public acting in his installations – more than 30 000. A selection of almost 1000 photographs is here published. The photographs of Audience Works, published most of the time in series, are similar to a story- board or a kind of subsequent usage scenario. They reproduce sequences of movements, gestures, evoking the first use of photography as an analysis tool (Muybridge, Marey, etc.). The analytical observation of these images reveals the intimacy of the public, first discovering, then comprehending the work, through fumbling, surprise, joy, wonder, fear or frustration. The artist becomes an ergonomist or even an ethnologist, using his own work as a field of research.
A second volume, entitled Manual, is dedicated to the text, notices written for the seventeen installations, published in 8 languages: English, Arab, Chinese, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian. The editorial form that is chosen here is reminiscent of the layout commonly applied to manuals and guidelines of electronic equipment.
Audience Works consists of these two volumes inserted in a slipcase, limited to a number of 100 copies.

With Audience Works, Samuel Bianchini extends the reactive character of his works and focuses on the participative dimension of his audience by publishing a book whose cover is responsive to temperature; the ink reacts to the heat of the hand. The title of the publication appears completely if the reader is able to handle the object.
In order to develop this bias in the context of an exhibition, and given that the artist’s book constantly questions the way it is displayed and handled by the public, Samuel Bianchini has conceived especially for this project a “display box for touching”, a glove box, modeled on traditional laboratory equipment. Enhancing and, at the same time, distancing the act of touching, the display boxe encourage manipulation. Samuel Bianchini deeply values experience: one must live and practice the exhibition, and not solely contemplate it.

*A piece of art of Samuel Bianchini and Thierry Fournier

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Extracts of boards, Audience Works, Samuel Bianchini, 2013
© 2013 Samuel Bianchini and mfc-michèle didier

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Audience Works, Samuel Bianchini, 2013
exhibition at mfc-michèle didier gallery, Paris from January to March, 2013
Photographs: © Charles Duprat

Audience Works, Samuel Bianchini, 2013
exhibition at the library of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, May 2015.
Photographs : © Samuel Bianchini - ADAGP

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Audience Works, Samuel Bianchini, 2013
Jeu de Paume Bookstore, February 2020.
In the framework of the exhibition "The Supermarket of images"
Jeu de Paume, Paris, Feb. - June 2020.
Photographs: © Samuel Bianchini - ADAGP