Basile Fournier
Currently working in the Art, Music and Culture scene, Basile Fournier is a multidisciplinary creative working between graphic design and his artistic practice where he expresses his message through video, photography, magazines, and more. His interests lie in the relationship between technology, virtual realities and reality itself; how it affects our creativity and what it means to be a designer or artist now and in the future. Although Fournier recognises the need for an artistic identity, he likes the idea of design being “in service of the project" when it comes to his graphic design work; allowing his visual identity to be adaptable but still keeping room for experimentation and originality. In his artistic practice, his current visual language features dark, blue tones with dystopian backdrops where he questions the purpose of life and human identity in relation to technology. While he wants to keep positivity in his work, his aim is to explore important topics like online privacy in a delicate and powerful manner.
How would you describe your work and visual language?
My creative practice is kind of balancing between working in the field of design for my personal projects or for clients, and with my artistic and experimental practice, where I can really express my ideas and my vision of the world through videos, visual art, or different mediums, where I can get more freedom and doing projects that I love within the time I want. So one practice is always inspiring the other one and finding a good balance between these two or even connections or bridges that gathers both my practices is really something I care about.
I’m also deeply interested in how technology affects us as human beings, how it influences the environment around us but mostly how it impacts creativity in a lot of ways. I’m super curious about what it will mean to be a designer or an artist in the near future and I like to focus my work around these ideas.
I won't say that I have a visual language in my graphic design practice. I like the idea that design needs to be in the service of the project and so the visual language needs to adapt in the most efficient way to fit and make sense with the project. Although as I’ve said earlier, my artistic practice is always blending with my design practice and sometimes it's hard to separate both. I think it’s important to have an identity when you have an artistic practice as an image maker because everyone can look at images or trends and do the same thing, that's why it's even more challenging to be original today and that's why I always try to be myself and do what I want to do because I'm convinced that the more you are true to your inner self, the more you will be relevant and be able to express your purest and deepest ideas or feelings. So in my artistic practice, I would describe my visual language as a lot of dark and blue tones, questioning the purpose of life, with a touch of melancholy and dystopian aspect. I’m always trying to come back to the thin line between the virtual and the real, our identities as human beings and avatars. Also, how to document this feeling of the time passing and still be relevant in our planned obsolescence era. And of course, make design that impacts and touches people in a sincere and sensitive way.
What is your main motive or message you are trying to convey in your work?
I want to make work that is powerful, delicate and that triggers something in someone. I want to put out positive vibes through my work but also ask questions that are important to me, such as online privacy, or anything that is related to the relationship between human beings and technology. I want to push boundaries with different mediums and always try to create strong and original visuals.
The relationship between technology and the self seem to be your main interest at present, what brought on this interest?
I’m always curious and interested in new inventions and technologies because it makes me imagine how the future will be shaped. As a designer, you can talk about important or difficult subjects and make it understandable through your own vision and sensibility. I’m often obsessed by subjects, and when I find something that interest me, I try to go deep in the subject and make something out of it with my creations.
In How to be (almost) invisible (on) the Internet, you explore 21 steps to erase your online presence featuring corporate imagery and different paper stocks to convey ‘transparency’. How do you feel social media has affected your real-world self and vice versa?
I do believe that our basic human rights should be respected as much offline than online. I like the idea that I can talk about those important subjects through my work.
The corporate imagery is something I like to use within my work because I like the idea that those images are made for a specific commercial purpose. I like to find the poetry in it, putting it out of it’s original context and to give it a new meaning to tell a different story.
Social media is of course something that influences me a lot but is defintely a great tool for me to show my work and to connect with people that I admire and want to work with.
I also like to take my references out of the social media world; taking a scene from a movie, or a moment in a song that inspires me and try to translate it into my designs.
I think that in a hyper-connected world, it is important to disconnect yourself sometimes from the online world, to get new ideas and generate different images.
Taking into account that your work focuses on dystopia and worlds of the future, do you have any speculation on the future of digital design and what you’d like to see more of?
I like to think that design is going to be more focused on how we experience it. I’d like to see it as a real interaction, something that you can feel. With the progress of A.I and other new technologies and softwares, the place of the designer is less and less considered but I see it as an opportunity to rebuild the status of the designer. The designer of tomorrow should be more focused on the context, the story that he wants to tell and how he wants to tell it. Today, everyone is making images so you need to have a strong identity and knowledge technically but also in theory. At the end, I think that what really matters in design are ideas; and ideas are purely human.
What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment, I’m working on my diploma project which is something that I can’t really talk about right now, I’m also working on some fashion and cultural projects for clients. I’m actually working a lot with CGI which is a medium that I really want to push forward in my practice. I’m always excited to discover and learn new things but I will definitely say that I’m very interested in CGI, Artificial Intelligence and all the mediums that are related to technology, and how it influences the design. It is always exciting for me to push the boundaries of a medium, especially challenging to find ways to create images that were never made before with these new technologies. I also love the fact that design or an image can provoke a strong feeling, especially the feeling when you can't understand how an image is made and it just seems like magic.
courtesy BASILE FOURNIER
interview ANISHA KHEMLANI
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