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Screen Savior
Blurring the boundary between art and technology with Etienne Delacroix
by Jenn Leong and Sasha Costanza-Chock
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 It's been said many times that one person's trash is the next person's treasure. No one embodies that maxim better than multimedia artist and nomadic computer workshop pioneer Etienne Delacroix. Like a prospector panning for gold, Etienne has the ability to pick through endless heaps of cast-off computers, carefully disentangling wires, circuitry, and power supplies, to salvage still-useful parts. He then transforms these tech nuggets into the tools and media of his unique, computer-based art.
First a physicist and then a painter in traditional media, Belgian-born Etienne has traveled the globe, carrying his sketchbook, a satchel of spare circuit boards, and a software animation of his own creation. With these tools, he introduces local communities to his "nomadic workshops," where he immerses them in innovative multimedia art projects. Participants in the workshops learn to build their own graphics and sound platforms, link them together in local networks, and, finally, collectively create multimedia installations that depict their own local histories and cultures in relation to the global reach and influences of technology.
Now working at MIT's Media Lab, and at the Massachusetts College of Art, in Boston, we interviewed Etienne in his studio at MassArt, where the animation of his latest installation-in-progress pulsated across twelve screens. Tracing his unceasing motion between an easel against one wall, the computer workstation in the corner, the pile of spare parts near the door, and a student at a workbench in the center -- all the while poring over a motherboard with a soldering iron -- we did our best to keep up. But, like the technology that figures in his art, once you've caught up with him, he's already two steps ahead yet again.
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On video, Etienne talks about the art of turning junked computer parts into virtual paintbrushes.
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Etienne Delacroix
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