La Dispersion du Fils is a collection of more than 22,000 sequences from more than 500 movies filmed between 1999 and 2007 by Jean Michel Bruyère, which are related to Actaeon’s tragedy to which La Dispersion du Fils itself is referring: it is constituted by the chaos of the memory-images of Actaeon. It proposes to enter in the stomach of one of the fifty hounds of Actaeon, just after Actaeon who found naked Diana bathing had been killed, scattered and devoured by his own horde, as he was confounded with the prey.

In this 360° immersive, interactive and stereoscopic environment, the spectator may progress through the narrative and explore the constituent threads whose aspect and spatial distribution are redefined and recomposed infi nitely. La Dispersion du Fils is designed to unfold without interruption for hours or days at a time.

In 2008, after the iCinema team finished the making of T_Visionarium II for the AVIE platform, I proposed to Jean Michel Bruyère that he could use both this platform and T_Visionarium II’s interaction design to develop a new work using his own video archive. With this as a starting point, and working closely together with iCinema’s chief scientist Matt McGinity, Jean Michel developed a quite new interaction paradigm for his work. Most importantly the operability changed so that it was no longer interactively modified by the user but rather it was computationally controlled to display infinitely variable permutations according to certain complex algorithmic processes. This was combined with a 3D ‘ride movie’ aesthetic that perfectly embodied the dramatic mythological narrative underlying Jean Michel’s piece.

Jeffrey Shaw