monographic room: Stephanie Boisset
As freelance web designer I work primarily on projects in the fields of art, culture,
fashion and design.
I'm a follower of stylistic intuitive navigation. My design is often described as pure,
plain or without any superficial embellishments.
White is an important component for
the visual identities I create and I tend to favour HTML over a lot of animations.
On top of this occupation, I pursue my own artistic work.
My own artwork platform, named "boisset.de, an evolving identity", may be seen as
my initial experimentation with the internet as an artistic medium.
I started to look
into the subject of identity, using myself as "material object", and to explore the
possibilities offered by HTML/Javascript for creative production - fictional, e-mails, and
visual design.
Besides this site, I've recently created a new one, called "day by day" and based on cms-tool, which permit myself to take a distance to my work.
This website is like virtual space, for a retrospective I would make to myself, where I show my photographic work and my "little series".
Presentation of the proposal for the index-page of Site Specific
As a "non-flash webdesigner", I've proposed a very plain index page, which let's the
internaut enter directly into the site.
The idea of this page was to have the possibility of being extended into the layout of all the site, which would be based essentially on
the textual content and on accessibility (respecting the html standards and of the w3c
norm).
This approach was connected with Site Specific's statement and title of the project. The
specifics of a website are to be read, or seen, by most of the people.
The main part of the index page, with the navigation toolbar, only contained small views
of the artists Site Specifics and the introduction (or concept) of the global project. The
pictures could also have been linked to their pages.
The navigation toolbar permits you to enter each category of the site and by "projects"
or "artists", one can reach each different artist or project with the sub menu, that
appears with a roll-over.
The right part of the site was to be seen as a tool: a newsletter field that would be on
every page and a "keywords-container" that would allow a contextual navigation
through the site. The internaut could have visit the site through his own interests.
This graphic approach would have allowed Site Specific's site to be seen more as a platform
and a communication tool (maybe "mediation tool") than a single "self-presentation"
website.
WEBDESIGN AND PROJECT OVERVIEW
Freelance Web Designer: all references on stephanieboisset.net
Mobile Studios, a European Project
Iconclub, Degital Media Center, Berlin
Anne de Lajartre, press & communication agency, Paris
Anne Willi, fahion designer, Paris
Frédérique Daubal, designer
La Périphérie, art gallery Paris
The Catering Company, deluxe caterer, Paris
Co-curator of the exhibition "Virtual Identities", August 2005, Galerie Tristesse, Berlin.
ARTISTIC WORK
April 2006
Latente Sehnsucht: An online project Blaise Bourgeois.
March 2006
Day by Day, diary and memories.
August 2005
"And she never came back..." (CD-Rom and 144 pictures) / Galerie Tristesse, Berlin-Kreuzberg.
August 2004
"Passage à l'an 2000 en 36 pauses" and an off-line Version of "boisset.de, eine Identität im Werden..." / Ladyfest, Kaufbar, Berlin-Friedrichshain.
July 2002
First version of Latente Sehnsucht: An online project Blaise Bourgeois for Free Manifesta 2002, Frankfurt am Main.
September 2001
"Please, chat with me!": Online Project from Stephan_i_e for the group exhibition "Love Me, Love Me", La Périphérie, Malakoff (Paris).
September 1999
"Rettet das Ampelmädchen", (project printed by CityCards, Berlin).
August 1999
Lauching of the Website "boisset.de, une identité en devenir".
January 1999
Beginning of the serie blahblah, autofictions based on my own real life.
INTERVIEW WITH THE JURY:
Corrado Mora. Your esthetic approach to the web page is clear and pure. Balanced. Your approach seems minimal:
no bold, italic and underlined characters, no flash animations.
How can coexhist in your esthetic the "impact glance" (it seems that a visitor takes just few instants to like or dislike a webpage) with the rigorous dressing of the webpage elements?
Stéphanie Boisset. You are a little bit radical, when you said "no bold, no italic, no underline", because i take care that one, rapidly recognizes the link from the rest...
But it's true that i don't like it, when the titles are bold, when everything blinks and so on... It's too much like, "don't miss this part and I want to be sure, you are going to click here as well...".
Everyone can go through a site the way he or she wants..
The "impact glance" you are talking about comes a lot from the content, that has to be put online... For my part, in a lot of websites with animation, I always skip the intro, because it's the first and the only choice I have...
I understand the "rigorious dressing" as the code-source...
And it coexists with the "pure and clear" esthetic approach in the way all my pages are going to be validated by the w3c and that "google" can find them easier, if as search engine it feels like it...
CM. Your concept of white as background is recurent in the websites you've designed. Why do you use white?
SB. When my computer is buggy, i'm in front of a black screen... so I prefer having it working!
The first index page of boisset.de was completly black and suddenly (it also has to do with my own experience), I've found white much more quiet and attractive and it gave all the work another dimension... something futher then a "private homepage", maybe, more sophisticated...
Also it's easier to read dark text on a light background, I think.. And then, you know, people like this and ask you for that, maybe it works as a signature...
CM. Beside your webdesign profession, you act as an artist.
Your work, concentrated mostly on the website www.boisset.de, is about personal identity and self-definition. Which role do the web play in your artistical approach?
Do you find harmony between a medium like the internet and your personal past, made - beside many other events - of France and Germany, of web-conception as a rigorous digital page to edit and as a way to express yourself?
SB. Without the web, boisset.de wouldn't exist.
This medium maybe permits me to do what I did before: writing on my photographs, or write comments next to them, but at the same time have a place where I can put my work and where to show it.
And even more: to include almost instantanly the comments / reactions of other people (before the blog!).
With boisset.de, I don't use the web as a presentation of different works (like references), I use it to create a sorte of platform on "an evolving identity", working like a "stand-in" of my real life... I play a lot with this website, as if I would have to feed that virtual space.
I've started something new: day-by-day, a website made and updated with a publishing system! With it I'm going to find a kind of harmony, have much more distance to what I do maybe.
CM. You did many artistical collaborations or contributions, in works like "latente sehnsucht", "project hope", "angoisses urbaines".
But even in your solo projects you reach a dialogue and external contributions. How does operate the collective in your artistical approach?
SB. I took part on different online events as you mentioned "project hope" from Reiner Strasser, Annie Abrahams, Alan Sondheim or "Angoisses urbaines" from Tamara Laï and more... It's spreading my work... And this little "spot" is linked to their work. Maybe, it's more the collective in sense of the network.
My solo projects, as you call them, are always built with "material": I find the pictures, I "steal" a conversation in the metro, I imagine stories, when someone tells me something and I include "human beings" into my work publishing their mails, asking them to be on pictures...
For those projects, even if I don't exactly know what the final result should be, I've got all the control,and I make the decision. So I don't leave many places to the "collective".
In collaborative projects like Latente Sehnsucht made with the artist Blaise Bourgeois, everyone has to be involved in the project in different levels with different ideas... I think, it's more a team work (2 artists and a programmer Simon Morvan).
Actually, it's the same for websites projects, there is a project manager, a concepter, a webdesigner, a programmer... Everyone has a specified function and different knowledge, but one has to be interactive with the others to produce.
CM. You tend to give power to the written word, and to its spatial collocation. I'm thinking about "and she never came back...", and surely about all your webdesigner production. Beside this, you use image. Photography, above all. Which is your esthetic and conceptual approach to it?
SB. In that work, you mention, there is also sound... this work is based on emails i received and on photographs... Those pictures, i've made 5 years after receiving those e-mails, are completly built-up (on the writings but also on my memories)... the sound is the voice of the person, who wrote these e-mails... 5 years later, I asked him to record what he wrote 5 years ago...
The content of those e-mails were written in response to the photographs I sent to him...
And now, 2006, with those new pictures, I wrote new texts to go with on a new website I've created daybyday.stephanieboisset.net... "And she never came back..." might be the conclusion of boisset.de, I still don't know, but I need a break from her.
So there is a perpetual play, like a ping-pong game, between text and image... Sometimes the text is the starting point of a project and othertimes the pictures (images I do, I create or I find...) are the pretext to play...
CM. Your use of the web (artistically and as webdesigner) is thick.
I mean: you fill (in a minimalist, pure way) pages with contents and concepts, creating your personal network and references. It's rare in a contemporaneity made of millions of blogs, tv-channels, websites...infinite media - too much of them without real contents. Are you able to love internet in this landscape?
SB. Yes of course... It's not because of the different point of view or of the different way of life of people on earth, that I wouldn't like the planet!
There is a lot of informations on the web and everyone has to select and choose what he/she likes... I'm sure that as in the same way in "real" life one has these and those circles, one re-creates the same on the web with your own bookmark about a kind of topic, that people connected with and so on...
