Simon Renaud's fresco takes as its starting point the Les Silos multimedia library, its architecture and its missions. His starting point is a familiar, everyday element: the barcode (a graphic sign that we rarely look at because it is designed and read by machines). His aim is to create a monumental work that questions the transformations that digital technology has had on writing.
His fresco is a reference to the digitisation of archives, using the aesthetics of barcodes as the written form of the digital. With this fresco, the people of Chaumont will have to decipher a hidden sentence. The key to reading the letters is to look at the counter-forms of each sign in the work. The artist wants to understand the limits of steganography (the art of hiding text in an image), in other words, how far can we go to continue to distinguish the text in the image? Using the principle of augmented reality, passers-by will be able to scan the fresco to access a virtual extension of the work.
Produced in January 2022, this black-and-white vinyl fresco stretches for almost 40 metres from the Pont de Tôle to Les Silos. To decipher, "the real is inscribed in the virtual":
Fresque de Simon Renaud
