The art of the sample is perhaps the most interesting development in the evolution of music production. When done properly, a sound, a rhythm, can be reborn into a new form, a new context, a new energy. But, the use of the sample isn’t limited to the medium of sound. Sam Van Olffen, an artist who lives and works in Montpellier, France, constructs worlds through the use of what he terms “graphic sampling.”
Courtisane
I came across Van Olffen’s work while I was researching conceptual, Dieselpunk and Steampunk-related art online. What struck me first about Van Olffen’s work was the masterful way he invokes the future by referencing the past, and I was intrigued by his use of late-19th-to-early-20th Century war paraphernalia such as gas masks and trench coats. Van Olffen’s work goes beyond pastiche, instead his works are cohesive visions of netherworlds: neither past nor future, and yet, paradoxically, beholden to both. One of the most interesting aspects of Van Olffen’s work, though, is his ability to give the future a sense of nostalgia. His romantic dystopias seem to long for a past that never really existed.
Van Olffen was kind enough to answer a few questions for me about the motivations and machinations behind his work.
Your art combines imagery from many different time periods – some that haven’t even happened yet. Which interests you more – the past or the future? Why?
Chapelier
I’m certainly not interested in the future, I don’t see anything bright in that direction. The only light I see is not the daylight, rather the one of a locomotive that human race is about to catch at full throttle and that will smash this once living entity before this latter one had even the time to follow the recommendations of Stephen Hawking, namely colonize space. Since the death of science-fiction, I’m not expecting anything from the future excepting maybe an encounter of the third kind, which would make me withdraw immediately what I’ve just said!
I’m more interested in the past as a way to understand the present and how in less than one century we all became “citizens of the age of the ephemera” as Alvin Toffler said pertinently. The lost civilizations, the great conflicts, men, discoveries, etc., whole those new quantic waves that were shaping the face of humanity. Needless to say it was more impressive than… Facebook!
When you say, “the death of science fiction,” what do you mean? Why do you feel it is dead?
Zyklon B Baby
One century ago, in other words yesterday, the XXIst century was imagined as a prosperous era where everyone would have been happy in his work, the disparities would have disappeared and we would be travelling in flying cars… Thirty years, that’s not so long ago… And what do we got? Planes in the face (9/11), children taken as hostages and killed on a large scale (Beslan) and so on.
From Homo Sapiens we are now Homo Numericus. If George Orwell was still alive, he would be amazed by all the things our time can offer on a silver plate at the startup of his computer. As for Emil Cioran, he would already have blown his brains out since a while!
More seriously, the Science Fiction doesn’t mean anything anymore for me except an aesthetic value…
When do you think this happened?
Science Fiction as a genre has disappeared from the radar since, let’s say, the 1930s and the Turing machine that indirectly contributed to the birth of the Internet. That’s is the less to say not a small revolution.
The intrusion of the Net in our time is not science fiction, it is very real and nobody saw it coming except a few prophets. If you had said at the end of the World War II that in half a century the kids of your kids would be sending photos through waves, listening to music on dematerialized supports and chatting in real time with people on the other side of the planet, I think you would have been considered as a lunatic or at least for a serious crank, because in the Science Fiction facts it had only a meaning when it was not existing.
Nowadays everything written, thought, realized, imagined by the so called Science Fiction artists has far more chances to happen and in a shorter time limit than the Science Fiction has ever been able to imagine since his origins, that is to say from Jules Verne.
The balance of forces has changed: everything, absolutely everything, including the cybernetic man or the cloned dog, has become more likely than unlikely and that’s all the difference.It’s in that way that for me the Science Fiction is dead and while its body is still warm Anticipation has already replaced it.
Oxygen
You satarize both historical figures (Winston Churchill) and pop icons (Disney) with a combination of humor and anger. How do you feel about pop culture?
I don’t feel anything, I’m not interested anymore by pop culture. For me it is like advertisement: it tends to eat oneself as “renewal” which is ultimately never new, as it would like us to believe; it is more like a frozen meal badly warmed.
Some of my favorite work of yours are the post-apocalyptic Victorian pieces. What was your inspiration for this work?
Mecatron
First of all, I’d like to put right one thing: my pieces are not Victorian but rather Second Empire. This might seem to be a quite trivial precision but this is an important one. Steampunk is ordinarily represented in a Victorian environment and, according to me, that’s what confers to the different representations a similar look, whatever the production horizon is. The Crystal Palace will always be the Crystal Palace, and London, London dispite the presence of a little mechanical dog or a turbo fiacre flying here and there. My pieces being not positioned in London but in Paris, the Paris of the baron Hausmann, Napeleon III and Victor Hugo, I strongly believe that my images doesn’t have that similar look. It was a period of confusion, riot in the very heart of the city when the face of the capital was changing to become what we know today. It could not have happened without a certain idea of chaos which is quite seductive for me, as you can easily understand. So I think that the part of my work related to that period are more Retro-chaotic Second Empire than post-apocalyptical Victorian. More than a precision it is the answer to your question.
What is the process for your work? What medium do you use? Is everything done on a computer?
As powerful as a computer is with its quadcore, tera octets of storage and gigas of RAM or even a Colossus type computer like in the movie of Joseph Sargent, it will never give you an original idea even if you connect firewire or hdmi plugs to your ears. It’s only a tool I use to finalize some steps like I could use a hammer to drive a nail into a wall. To go further with that metaphor: before driving the nail into the wall, the wall had to be built and before that, plans had to be done and so on.
Same process for an image: first the idea, then the sketches and a more elaborated drawing, usually a wash drawing. A lot of photographic takes are following and the computer comes into the process, to work at the same time on preparatory steps and the final ones, as a centralization tool.
Bon Boulet Bobbies
What do the terms “steampunk” and “dieselpunk” mean to you? How have these movements influenced you, or do you feel it is the other way around?
Steampunk and Dieselpunk mean nothing, they are only generic words to name things. Personally I refuse the idea to belong to one or other of those categories. You may notice that I’m not only doing “Steampunk” images but that I’m also exploring other universes, trying to keep, of course, a stylistic consistency in the use of duotone or colors.
For the rest I wouldn’t say that I’m influenced by other artists in that field. If I need to refer to something I’d say classical images, like North American pictures from the beginning of the XXth century or paintings of Edward Hopper, for example, whom was said to “paint the silence”, or Michelangelo whose artworks are always worth contemplating.
To conclude, I’m not making Steampunk, I’m making Graphic Sampling.
Babel Central Station
