THIBAULT BRUNET | FRAGMENTS OF THIS VIRTUAL WORLD

ABOUT THUBAULT BRUNET

French photographer Thibault Brunet (b.1982) plays with the codified genres in photography to deepen the relationship between our reality and the entire social digitalized environment we currently live in.

He graduated at the Ecole supérieure des Beaux Arts in Nîmes and is recognized since 2008 by his outstanding series of images focusing on video games.

THIBAULT’S ACHIEVEMENTS

His work drew the attention of several institutions and competition juries, and in 2012 was selected for the Photo Month in Paris, Berlin and Vienna and was amongst the finalist of the Aperture Foundation Prize in New York, and in the Foam Talent prize in 2013 in Amsterdam.

In 2014 he took part to a collective project, France(s) Territoires Liquides.

He presented «Typologie du virtuel», a project in which he selected in Google Earth buildings that were co-produced by anonymous individuals, hence shedding a light on the desire to leave a trace in the digital world. Thibault Brunet collects fragments of this virtual world – shopping centers, public social housing, and seats of large commercial firms – that belong to a global architectural typology, unrelated to the territory itself. By adding a drop shadow defined with the date and time of its creation, the artist anchors these fragments to a specific moment and location. He re-contextualizes the image by connecting it to its creator’s action, and thus it becomes a new link in a collective creative chain. With the title of his series, a cataloging principle devoid of personal expression, and a composition dictated by a fixed procedure, Thibault Brunet refers to « anonymous sculptures » or the « typology of industrial buildings » made by the photographers Bernt and Illa Becher.

The images were exhibited at the Tri Postal museum in June 2015 and the Biennale de Lyon in September 2015.

Thibault started a new approach for the PMU Carte Blanche 2014 at the BAL and worked on the digitalization of the real world using a 3D scan. Since then, this project is ongoing with the technological partnership of Leica for the series « Territoires circonscrits » and has been exhibited for the first time in November 2015 at the Binôme Gallery.

PRESENT AND FUTURE

In the recent years, he has been working on the publication of two photography books: Typologie du virtuel was released in October 2016 (ed. La Pionnière) and Inexplorations was released in 2017.

He is currently being represented by the Binôme Gallery in Paris and the Heinzer-Reszler in Lausanne.

Check more about his work here.