Joseph Bona

Biography

Joseph Bona’s audio-visual works deal with the transition from the material world to the digital world. As a director of experimental animated films, he is interested in exploring the use of digital tools similar to those in video games. Working primarily in pairs with musicians for the purpose of live audio-visual projections, he is also inspired by electro-acoustic music made with his brother Louis Bona. Joseph Bona has produced two animated films, ‘Voyage analogique’ and ‘Avion’, which both combine sculpture and computer processing, with music that mixes acoustic and electronic sound.

Another theme in Bona’s films is a focus on a common object of real or virtual human mobility, such as the car, the plane and the screen. These objects become the main characters of his films, which invite their viewers into a transfigured vision of these objects.

What Joseph conjures in these creations are instruments or methods that are similar to a musical instrument but instead use light, colour and symbols. In this sense, Bona’s work has a strong connection with music as he shares a method of producing it.

In the same spirit, Joseph's drawings presented by ICHANT gallery make a passage into the digital world, asking; how is our world perceived from this parallel space that is digital?

The experimental interest of Joseph Bona's drawings is based on this passage from reality transformed  into a signal, as it is the case in electroacoustic music. His drawings are often in the forms of grids, which ask to be read, as the way physical nstruments are intended to be activated. Interpreted and scanned in the same way as sound, these images form a new language, a change of scenery, as if coming from somewhere else, from an external point of view that asks us to discover our world in an extra-human vision. Bona likes to say about his work that it is about images as perceived by extraterrestrials.