Monique Wender

In the early 80’s I made a series of paintings, the Pixelized Cows, simulating the low resolution images generated by the computers of the time. I had taken pictures of cows, and with the tools of the ENSAD video workshop, I captured them, embedded them into each other, colored, with the intention of finding a new way of representing them and making paintings. In the late 1980s, the first microcomputers appeared. Since the early 90s I was able to transform the images I captured with a black and white video surveillance camera after having recovered them from the press (as artists do today with the Internet). These numerous and infinitely manipulable images having no support (except the screen), I imagined objects on which they could be applied, and installations on themes related to the profusion of images: Zapping, Image cocoon, Image flow, Image packages, Homage to Monet. From 1994 to 1996, to realize the Packages d’Europe installation, I traveled across our continent to take pictures. Each object in this installation is like a snapshot of Europe because I have mixed photos from several countries, while systematically repeating the same themes: architecture, industry, portrait, landscape, war. There, the computer was used to transform the colours, the brightness, sometimes the composition, so that the photos could play together within the same object. It took another two years to complete and I first presented this work in England at the Kent Institute of Art and Design in 1998. From 1999 to 2005, and still based on the photographs I had taken in Europe, I created three interactive travel diaries: Moving Tables: The Port of Rotterdam, La Ruhr, Ireland, and the dvd video version of the Port of Rotterdam. In 2006, after the trips to European cities, the installation of photographs and animated films, I started painting again, which I do in parallel with photography. These trips gave me a new taste for photography, and new subjects: urban landscapes and consequently, people in the city.