A B O U T
The Robert Turner Collective is a Geneva-based artistic collaboration between Louis-Hadrien Robert and Paul Turner founded in 2019.
The collective is active in many domains – audiovisual installations, performances, moving and still images – often working in transdisciplinary projects involving music, sound art and dance.
Paul (left) grew up in New Zealand and lives in Geneva. He has a PhD from the University of Manchester and has worked in Scotland, Germany, France and Switzerland.
Louis-Hadrien (right) grew up Paris and lives in Clermont-Ferrand. He has a PhD from the University of Paris and has worked in Germany, Denmark, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
In the last 5 years, our artistic practice has
developed along two main axes:
abstraction/de(re)composition on the one
hand and spacetime as a way of rendering the
temporal in spatial terms on the other.
Our method of abstraction
and reconstitution – which we refer to as algorithmic
abstraction – starts by imagining how a computer might "see".
Any pictorial representation of a scene has a “seer”
whose viewpoint is significant to how we interpret
the image. This is not the viewer of the
finished work in a gallery, but rather the person
(or other) whom the artist has in mind as the one
seeing the scene being depicted. The idea of
algorithmic abstraction has at its origin the
following question: what if the “seer” were
non-human? What if our “eyes” are those of a
computer or algorithm?
The mathematics and algorithms
that we use are “mere” tools of construction (at the
level of using carpentry tools to build a piano before
undertaking the creative process of creating music).
Nonetheless
they remain fundamental to our
approach.
The second principal axis of our work, used mainly in
moving image and sculptural works, involves interpreting
the temporal in spatial terms and vice versa. Any film
clip is made up of two-dimensional frames (space) which
when lined-up along a time axis produce moving images.
Our point of view is to consider this shoe-box full of
pixels as a unified 2+1-dimensional spacetime. Within
this unified structure, it becomes possible to swap the
time direction with one of the two spatial direction,
by simply rotating the shoe-box. The result is a video
which is in general very abstract but sometimes faintly
recognisable features come in and out of existence. The
visuals created by this methods are very different from
any synthetic process: shapes and colours evolve rather
than “move” and the emerging patterns and textures appear
organic yet unnatural without the usual markers indicating
the flow of time.
We use this technique not only to produces standalone
pieces but also for scenographic
work in the performing arts.