Nicolas Bailleul

NEWS: NICOLAS BAILLEUL’S BOOLEAN VIVARIUM (2024)

French filmmaker and visual artist Nicola Bailleul, author of the groundbreaking film les survivants (featured at the 2022 edition of the Milan Machinima Festival), has completed his new film, Booolan Vivarium (no relation to Lorcan Finnegan’s masterpiece, Vivarium). Clocking at 55 minutes, this experimental video essay tells the story of two friends, Léo (Léo Hoffsaes) and Nicolas (Nicolas Bailleul), who create Vivarium, a video game in which they observe the rotting of a house strangely reminiscent of their own. Faced with the scale of the task, cohabitation becomes complicated and the duo is put to the test. The film, which has distinct kaufmanesque vibes, will make its debut at the upcoming edition of Cinema du Réel.

An artist and researcher, Nicolas Bailleul is a graduate of the Haute École des Arts du Rhin (Strasbourg) and holds a master’s degree in anthropological and documentary cinema (Université Paris-Nanterre). He is currently a PhD candidate at the Université Paris 8 under the supervision of Patrick Nardin in co-direction of Gwenola Wagon. Through the making of films and narrative installations, Nicolas Bailleul explores the notion of intimacy in the age of connected networks. He is particularly interested in new amateur practices (designated or claimed as such), uses and hijacks their tools and platforms, invests/infiltrates their online/offline spaces. Nicolas documents, fictionalizes and narrates these explorations. His thesis project focuses on the (bed)room in the age of new media.

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NEWS: SPECIAL PROGRAM_MACHINEMA

MMF MMXXII is proud to present a special program titled MACHINEMA at the Museum of Interactive Cinema in Milan on March 26 2022, showcasing the most innovative and groundbreaking examples of this fascinating artform

Machinima is, first and foremost, the result of a mistake, much like “massage” (in Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium and the Massage) and “donkey” (instead on monkey, in Shigeru Miyamoto’s Donkey Kong). Specifically, it is the misspelled contraction of machine cinema (machinema), as Paul Marino wrote in one of the earliest books on the topic. The misspelling stuck because in addition to the reference to the machine, i.e., the computer, and cinema, it also alluded to anime, itself referencing animation. Far from being problematic, this confusion in terminology, is speaks volumes about the medium’s incredible versatility. In many ways, machinima has been able to repurpose previous audiovisual forms of expression and to introduce something original. This is certainly true for the works featured in this special program — David Blandy’s Androids Dream, Nicolas Bailleul’s Les Survivants, Marie Foulston’s The Grannies, and Sara Sadik’s Khtobtogone — four superb machinema.

The program will be exclusively presented exclusively on the silver screen of the MIC, Museum of Interactive Cinema in Milan, Italy on March 26 2022.

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NEWS: LES SURVIVANTS AT MMF MMXXII

We are elated to announce that Les Survivants will be screened on March 26 2022 at the Interactive Museum of Cinema in Milan as part of MMF MMXXII.

Directed by Nicolas Bailleul, Les Survivants offers a compelling journey into the off-screen spaces of video games, wandering through a succession of spaces and temporalities in and out of play that constantly intermingle and interpenetrate. The interface becomes a universe in itself: a space of global sociability, like a film in real time. Les Survivants has been shown in several festivals and events and received the Grand Prix Contrebandes 2019 of the festival International du Film Indépendant de Bordeaux among others.

Nicolas Bailleul is a graphic designer and visual artist. After studying art in Strasbourg, he became interested in amateur practices (designated or claimed as such) and more particularly in the field of video, in the age of the internet. Nicolas is neither a youtuber nor a streamer, but uses/disturbs their tools of capture and invests/infiltrates their spaces of diffusion and meeting. He creates novel narrative devices to tell the story of his research. He lives and works in Paris.

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Watch an excerpt below