WHEEL ME OUT - Nicolas Sassoon

Artist Nicolas Sassoon was schooled in Angoulême, France, a city famous for its history of paper-making and printing, and more recently, animation, illustration and the graphic arts. Now living in Vancouver, Canada, Sassoon is helping to etch out a new definition for drawing in the 21st century.

By Victoria Ford

What's your history with this type of work? I've been working with computers for 15 years or so. Most of my earlier work was video/interactive but not really with this aesthetic. When I started making these drawings I would do them as preparatory work for a project, and I came to a point where I thought, actually, these drawings are more interesting than the final project. I didn't want to print them, I wanted to keep them on the computer screen.

Are there a lot of people doing this type of computer drawing? I'm often affiliated with net art, which has existed for maybe ten to 15 years, and It's part of my daily activity to exchange with this community, but at the same time, I feel a lot of my work has to do with computer drawing in general, which is not related to being online.

Where do you exhibit your art aside from online? I show in galleries and artist-run centres, and sometimes I also show online works in exhibitions. Lately I've been doing video projections as installations for music events, and I've also worked with a fashion designer in France, Risto Bimbiloski. I did a series of landscapes that looked like knitting patterns, and he knitted the landscapes into dresses. Because my work is computer-based, it has a lot of applications.

You seem to be heavily inspired by landscapes and architecture. I've been working a lot with 3D software over the last two years and I'm interested in how computer technology has created a different imagery for landscapes and architecture.

Is the work painstaking? It depends on the software I use. The painful part is getting the exact aesthetic I want. I spend ten to 12 hours a day on my computer, but lately my work has been a way to take me away from the computer because I'm starting to make printed images and installations and things like that.

What reactions do you get to your work? I think people consider it just something funny, I don't find a lot of people are really interested in what I do. What comes out most of the time is an association with old video games because it has a similar flashy feeling. We had a lot of discussions in art school about high art/low art, but for me it's not a problem. I've always looked at computer drawing as something that is as important as traditional drawing. There are people who are curious about it, so generally I try to focus on my exchanges with these people instead of going on a crusade to justify the 'seriousness' of my work. WMO

Nicolas' action-packed 'digital sketchbook':

youmakemesohappy.blogspot.com/

More work at the online art collective Computers Club:

nicolassassoon.computersclub.org/

Nicolas' collaboration with Risto Bimbiloski:

www.ristobimbiloski.com/collections.php?
galleries=ss1011