I love machines, the ones that fly, speak, count, or observe. I’m fascinated by the magical aspect of science; which seems to reduce the complexity of the world to a few mathematical formulae. There is a certain irony in making a visible and understandable image of such mysteries of the uni- verse as waves, time, space, stars, and light. However you analyse phenomena, index them, process them, measure them, the investigation doesn’t necessarily lead to any definitive answers, and the questions just get bigger. The universe is not as well ordered as our machines. It acts in an irrational, chaotic, violent and mysterious way, and even though there are computers that can design our forests, the control remains artificial. In the first place, our knowledge is subordinate to our ignorance. These scientific questionings have nourished my artistic work. They are the point of departure from which I construct stories I want to tell. Most of my images are staged, the situations composed, recreated, and interpreted. They are tableaux, micro-fictions, wrought with an aesthetic and pictorial eye. This work began with the field of space and it continues with new scientific research into robotics and synthetic biology. I always try not to fix the meaning of my photographs, and to leave them open to interpretation, often in suspense between two extremes like documentary and fiction, sense and nonsense, or the living and artificial.

Vincent Fournier