Since 2012, I’ve been teaching a “Creation and networks” course at la Sorbonne in a Digital Art and Creation Master. Every year, I am quite impressed by the artworks produced by the students, even if during the two previous years, students artworks were perhaps more experimental than this year.

The main difficulty in this course relies in the fact that students come from different sections: Environment Design and Digital Creation. Normally it is quite well balanced between the two sections, but this year, there were more Environment Designers (37 for 10 Digital creators) who were disappointed by the number of courses dedicated to digital creation.

So, when they discovered my first course about the evolution of online creation many of them were reluctant to produce what I asked them: to present themselves or their artistic practice with a net.art style, using the 90’ online aesthetics or the behavior, attitude, of the net.artists at that time.

  • Net.art and machinima class par Isabelle Arvers, Master Création numérique Sorbonne
    Net.art and machinima class par Isabelle Arvers, Master Création numérique Sorbonne


Finally, I received some great artworks, websites and tumblr and a very original proposal: a coat with many layers, pockets, hidden layers behind pockets, buttons, crochets, etc…. A total re-appropriation of the idea of pop up windows, hypertext and hidden links made with textile. Too bad that this student didn’t direct any machinima, I would have been very curious to see it…

The best of net.art selfportraits:

Thomas Garnerone in net.art
GIAA SIHPOA IN THE PFRECET WLROD by Marie Palmas
CAD Vdeogame by Jeronimo Vernetti
Net Myself and I by Vincent Morin

Then, they had to work in a collaborative way on a machinima and they had also to document how they worked together. Some of them directed machinima too much related to the game they used, without enough critical distance, with stories looking like descriptions of the game actions. However, three of them were good.

“Stade du Mirroir” is driven by rhythm. It represents avatar monitoring sequences, which are accelerated. In this acceleration, faces and corpses move in a strange way with micro movements, somehow disturbing.Another machinima also kept my attention: Near Death experiences. It is more abstract and in black and white but esthetically interesting as it catches good game actions.

Surprisingly the real performance comes this year from a narrative machinima, Glory, created with many different games, using a female character as a link and which ends in our real world.

The narrative is quite good as well as the game performance. For more experimentation in machinima, we will come back next year! 😉