Client: Casablanca French Institut

Location: Casablanca, Morocco

Completion date: 2014

Project Team

Artist

Miguel Chevalier

Other

Casablanca French Institut

Overview

Magic Carpets 2014, Miguel Chevalier
Generative and interactive virtual-reality installation
Music Michel Redolfi
Heritage Days, Church of Sacré Coeur, Casablanca (Morocco)
with Casablanca French Institut
Software Cyrille Henry and Antoine Villeret
50 m x 12 m / 164 x 39 ft

Goals

“Magic Carpets 2014” spreads out across the floor of the former Sacré Coeur of Casablanca Church, covering it with a huge interactive carpet of light at the occasion of Heritage Days.

Process

“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.

Additional Information

This work draws its inspiration from the world of biology and microorganisms. Cells multiply in abundance, divide and proliferate at a sometimes slow, sometimes rapid rate. 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. 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.