William Mapan, Artist, Paris
Philippe Bettinelli, Curator, New Media Department, Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris
Moderator: Dr Jeni Fulton, Head of Editorial, Art Basel
Paris has a long history of fostering advanced digital art: Vera Molnár spent most of her life in the city, and the Centre Pompidou has one of the very first collections in the world dedicated to digital media, inaugurated in 1976. Today, curators and institutions such as Jeu de Paume and Centre Pompidou exhibit and collect contemporary digital practices, from NFTs to AI works and beyond, while a new generation of artists and studios draws on research hubs like EnsadLab and IRCAM, and a gallery and museum network that commissions and exhibits work made with code.
This conversation brings together Philippe Bettinelli, curator at the New Media Department at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Paris-based artist William Mapan to look closely at the city’s current momentum. What mix of institutions, funding, and collector engagement allows digital practices to take root and grow?
French artist William Mapan (b.1988), combines traditional artistic methods with computer programming to create works that bridge digital and physical worlds.
Fascinated by computers since childhood, he pursued art after studying computer science and visual arts at Gobelins, where he currently teaches creative coding and generative art. Mapan develops his creative process through hand-drawn sketches and diverse graphical explorations, subsequently translating these ideas into algorithms. He views the computer as an extension of the human hand, enriching artistic expression. His work emphasizes humanity, manual gestures, and personal identity through introspective digital creations. Inspired by Abstract Expressionism and Impressionism, he references artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Klee, Etel Adnan, Sam Francis, and Henri Matisse. Notable series include ‘Anticyclones’, ‘Sketchbook’, and ‘Distance’, a collection of generative computational artworks created for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Philippe Bettinelli is a curator at the New Media Department at Centre Pompidou, Paris. He was previously curator of the Public Art and Visual Arts 1960–1989 collections at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Cnap). Alongside video, sound, and contemporary art in general, his research focuses on the history of digital art, from the 1960s to today. Among other projects, he curated the 2021 edition of the Marcel Duchamp Prize; the exhibition Mode d’emploi, suivre les instructions de l’artiste at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg (with Anna Millers); and 目China, a new generation of artists at the Centre Pompidou (with Gu Youyou and Paul Frèches). With Marcella Lista, he curated the NFT acquisitions and exhibition of the Centre Pompidou.
Dr Jeni Fulton is Art Basel’s Head of Editorial, leading the fair’s global content strategy and its digital magazine. She is the series editor for the Art Market Report and Survey of Global Collecting, co-published by Art Basel and UBS. She obtained her PhD on the subject of “Value and evaluation in 21st Century Art” from the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2017, and read Philosophy at the University of Cambridge for her undergraduate degree. She lectures on the art market, contemporary art history, and art and technology at Zurich’s University of the Arts (ZHdK), and teaches in the Executive Master’s in Art Market Studies at the University of Zurich.
#Conversations #Digital #dialogues #code #collectingdigital #art #Paris #today