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Maurice Benayoun

Maurice Benayoun
MoBen.jpg
Maurice Benayoun in 2000
Born Maurice Benayoun
(1957-03-29) 29 March 1957 (age 60)
Mascara, French Algeria
Education Pantheon-Sorbonne_University
Known for New Media Art
Notable work Quarxs (1991)
Tunnel under the Atlantic (1995)
World Skin, a Photo Safari in the Land of War (1997)
Awards Golden Nica
Ars Electronica 1998,
Chevalier des Arts et Lettres 2000,
Siggraph 1991,
Villa Medicis hors les murs, 1993,
Imagina, 1993,
International Monitor Awards...
Website http://www.benayoun.com/

Maurice Benayoun (aka MoBen or 莫奔) (born 29 March 1957 in Mascara, Algeria) is a French pioneer new-media artist and theorist based in Paris and Hong Kong. His work employs various media, including (and often combining) video, immersive virtual reality, the Web, wireless technology, performance, large-scale urban art installations and interactive exhibitions.

Born in Mascara, Algeria in March 1957, he moved to France in 1958. Graduating in Fine Arts (Pantheon-Sorbonne University) in the early 1980s, Benayoun directed video installations and short videos about contemporary artists, including Daniel Buren, Jean Tinguely, Sol LeWitt and Martial Raysse. In 1987 he co-founded Z-A, a computer graphics and Virtual Reality private lab. Between 1990 and 1993, Benayoun collaborated with Belgian graphic novelist François Schuiten on Quarxs, a computer graphics world that explores variant worlds with alternate physical laws. In 1993, he received the Villa Medicis Hors Les Murs for his Art After Museum project, a virtual reality contemporary art collection.

After 1994 Benayoun was involved with more virtual-reality and interactive-art installations. One of these was described by Jean-Paul Fargier in Le Monde (1994) as "the first Metaphysical Video Game". One important work from this period includes The Tunnel under the Atlantic, finished in 1995. This was a tele-virtual project linking the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. More than a technical performance, as the first intercontinental virtual reality artwork (called "televirtuality", Philippe Quéau, 1994), this installation was one-of-a-kind example of what Maurice Benayoun calls architecture of communication, as another way to explore limits of communication, after Hole in Space by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinovitz. The Tunnel under the Atlantic introduces the concept of dynamic semantic shared space.


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