In his artworks and performances, Julien Maire (b. 1969, France) systematically re-invents the technology of visual media. His research is a manifest hybrid between mediaarchaeology and the production of new media constellations. His output consists of prototypes that perform exactly what their etymology promises (from ‘protos’, ‘first’ and ‘typos’, ‘impression’ or ‘model’): proposing unique technological configurations that produce a new, specific image quality. As industrial prototypes, these original creations – no matter how technically clever and refined – are rather useless: they are too complex, too delicate and too clunky to ever be considered for mass production. As artistic statements, the main function of these full-scale constructions is to provoke an effect of wonder, alerting the viewer to the ambivalent status of moving images produced by a machine.

In a contemporary context of mutating media, Maire's works are at once innovative and archaic, seemingly simple yet unique in their radicality, both at the conceptual and the aesthetic level. This radicality is one that incites fundamental questions about the characteristics of the image and the position of their viewer. Working on the interstices between installation, performance and media art, Maire's creations are decidedly original, as he never combines art forms merely for a provocative or innovative effect. His manipulations are always motivated by a questioning of prevailing categories and visual strategies in the digital era.

Deconstructing time-based media such as video, film, slide projections and performances, Julien Maire underlines in the first place their durational aspect, making us aware of our own experience of an image in time. His prototypical contraptions confront immobility with movement, reality with illusion, and interrogate the notion of time and memory in the moving image. With his work, Julien Maire clearly enters into dialogue with the history of media, paradoxically through the design of new technological dispositifs. Working against the rhetoric of technology as progress and promise, Maire instead recalibrates technology and its effect on mediation. He modifies obsolete cinematic techniques to develop alternative interfaces that produce moving images.

Overcoming a simplistic opposition between analogue and digital media, Maire's work readily invites both a strategic reconsideration of indexicality and of apparatus theory.