Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau
Christa Sommerer, Ohlsdorf, 1964 and Laurent Mignonneau, Angoulême, 1967.
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau create interactive installations connecting artificial life, living systems and audience participation.
Artwork in the collection
Portrait on the Fly, 2015
About the artwork
Portrait on the Fly displays a swarm of thousands of digital flies. When someone stands before the monitor, the insects organise themselves to reproduce that person’s facial features. A small movement disperses the portrait, which is continually constructed and dissolved. The work connects selfie culture with change, transience and the impermanence of our image.
Artwork in the Encyclopedia of New Media Art archive
Acqua ma non troppo
About the artwork
Acqua ma non troppo was created specifically for Venice, a city whose rich cultural heritage presents, in the artists’ words, ‘humanity at its best.’ Mignonneau and Sommerer photographed historical paintings and motifs across the city and brought fragments of them into a generative water landscape, where they float, drift and slowly disappear. The work responds to the climate crisis, at a time when extreme weather events are increasing and cultural artefacts are in danger of being lost to rising sea levels and floods. For a city built on water, the threat is especially close. The result is a series of ‘mesmerizing, beautiful but slightly sad impressions of times lost,’ at once seductive and melancholic. Because the water landscape is generated rather than recorded, the images never settle, and the paintings seem to dissolve before our eyes. The animation was presented in 2023 at the Scuola Grande dei Carmini during the Re:Source Media Art History conference, bringing the images back to the city where they had been photographed.
Artistic career: Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau
Career and projects
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau combine backgrounds in botany, sculpture, video and art to create interfaces connecting audiences with living and artificial systems. Works such as Interactive Plant Growing, Fly Simulator and Neuro Mirror place physical and perceptual participation at the centre of the experience. Their career includes research and teaching in Interface Cultures in Linz, and awards including the 1994 Golden Nica for Interactive Art and the 2001 World Technology Award.
Portrait on the Fly received the eleventh ARCO-BEEP Award.
Biography · Encyclopedia of New Media Art Archive
Laurent Mignonneau (France, 1967) and Christa Sommerer (Austria, 1964) have worked together since the early 1990s and are among the pioneers of interactive art. In works such as Interactive Plant Growing and A-Volve, which won the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica, visitors shape living, evolving images through touch and movement. They lead the Interface Cultures department at the University of Art and Design Linz, and their work is held in major collections around the world.