Text Light Machines

"My Light Machines are made from a wall mounted device containing one thousand twenty four lightbulbs that play a film recording whose definition has been reduced to correspond the same number of pixels as there are lightbulbs. The image’s volume is still precisely rendered because of the level of contrast provided by the lights. This combination of electricity and digital aesthetics produce a phantomatic film that borders on abstraction. The image is repeated endlessly so that it has the hypnotic quality of a flame."
Extract from Xavier Veilhan, with texts by Alison M. Gingeras, Christine Macel, Xavier (in French and in English), exhibition catalogue, Espace 315, livre n°5, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004.

« The three first light machines have been developped for a show at the musee d’art contemporain de Montreal then at the Juan Miro Fundation in barcelona.
They are a new development of my interest in activeperception of the viewer.They are an extention of earlyer still images and installations, dealing with the process of making images (like the serie of the fotograms) speed, ghosts, light, persistance rétinienne, structure and construction, reality and trics.
The divice is adapted from the bulb boards and their full power is 10 000 watts. It is freestanding.
More like a lamp than a screen, they provide heat and light, litterally enlighting both vision and viewer.
The short films are chips burned and plugged in the base of the 9 machines .
As for a painting, you can not dissociate the media from the medium.
Films are short loops (from 2’30 ‘’to 5 minutes) based on 3 to 6 scenes each,  with an open narrative structure and no sound. The images are located between film, the dynamic experience of landscape (train, boat, bicycle, ski , plane and car) and the idea of easy listenning applied to vision.
The 1024 bulbs are providing a very low definition image, yet a very precise gray scale.The images are only figurative from far. »
Xavier Veilhan, october 2002.

Published in june 2007 :
Xavier Veilhan Light Machines, with a text by Elie During(in French and in English), exhibition catalogue, Écuries de Saint-Hugues, Cluny ; Fondation Vasarely, Aix-en-Provence, 2007. Ed. Les Presses du réel