Magic Carpets 2014, Casablanca | Miguel Chevalier

Generative and interactive virtual-reality installation
Music Michel Redolfi
Heritage Days, former Church of Sacré Coeur, Casablanca (Morocco)
with Casablanca French Institute
50 m x 12 m
Software : Cyrille Henry and Antoine Villeret
Technical production : Voxels Productions

“Magic Carpets 2014” spreads out across the floor of the former Sacré Coeur of Casablanca Church, covering it with a huge carpet of light. This work draws its inspiration from the world of biology, microorganisms, and cellular automata. Cells multiply in abundance, divide, merge, and proliferate at a sometimes slow, sometimes rapid rate. Everything comes together, comes apart, and changes shape at top speed. These organic universes mingle sometimes with constructivist universes made up of pixels.
These unstable, black-and-white megapixel tableaux gradually give way to vivid, color-saturated spirals that whirl about and execute genuine choreographic movements to the music of Michel Redolfi. An organic world or a pixilated one, this artificial universe somehow seems to meet up with the universe of living beings. This is a new kind of “technological Baroque” art that gives form to the formless while perpetually replenishing itself.  When the viewer moves, the trajectory of the curves is disrupted under their feet. Sinuously rippling curves bring back to life the artificial paradises of the Nineteen Seventies. They create unprecedented visual experiences that are not unreminiscent of psychedelic universes.
“Magic Carpets” revisits, via digital art, the tradition of embroidery with cross-stitching, Islamic art, and especially mosaics, which are not unreminiscent today of the notion of pixels. This installation pays homage to Moroccan craftsmanship, where carpetmaking holds an important place. This world of colors and shapes in movement takes us, as in a giant kaleidoscope, on an imaginary, poetic voyage. Miguel Chevalier’s new creative work plunges us into the magical universe of One Thousand and One Nights and flying carpets.