Kaspar, can you tell us about your career as a digital artist and what led you to choose nuclear power as the subject of this season's artistic residency?

Kaspar Ravel : I have a dual practice: digital as an artistic tool and digital as a subject. For me, the two are often linked and sometimes even inseparable. The tool approaches the subject, and the subject challenges the tool. It's a loop, a process that largely defines my art.
This year, I've decided to take my research a step further by exploring the physical infrastructures of the digital world, from communications satellites to the undersea cables linking continents to the Internet. At the heart of this network lies the electricity sector and its sources of production. It's among these that I've chosen to focus my attention on nuclear power.

What are your main inspirations behind this project?

K.R. : My residency at Sorbonne University enabled me to meet a number of researchers, including physicists, historians and philosophers of technology. These exchanges led me to take a close interest in the issue of radioactive waste and its burial. To extend my thinking, I went to meet people who live or work in the nuclear sector. One of the questions I asked myself was: how can we warn the people who will be living in a million years' time that we must not dig into our geological repositories? I'd say it was this question, among others, that inspired and motivated most of the works I produced this year.

How does your approach to digital art manifest itself in this specific context?

K.R. : Since 1993, many people - artists, scientists, architects, philosophers - have tackled the subject of nuclear power, and despite this, it can still be treated as an age-old problem, as it has a reputation for being insolvent. I'm not looking for a concrete solution: my approach has more to do with memory, whether digital or not, because we're not sure we'll still have computers in the distant future. So I had to combine my knowledge of computer science and algorithms to generate physical, resilient objects.

Can you tell us about the two of you working together? How does it work?

K.R. : I inventoried forty-two sites bearing witness to high levels of radioactive activity in the past, present or future. I had the idea of creating a symbolic time capsule for future generations, but I was looking for a medium capable of standing the test of time. On the advice of Nathalie Drach-Temam, I met Pierre and his collaborator Stéphane Lemaire, who specialize in DNA data encoding. I'm sure Pierre can speak to this better than I can, but DNA has an extremely resilient structure, making it an ideal medium for transmitting messages into the future.

Pierre Crozet : These are the fruits of our collaboration [Pierre Crozet holds up a tiny bag containing five DNA capsules.] It didn't result in a scientific paper, but in something different. Inside each of these capsules are the GPS coordinates of nuclear waste storage sites encoded on DNA, synthesized by Biomemory and encapsulated by the Imagène company.
Kaspar and I discussed this project last year, but for technical reasons we were unable to go ahead. In the meantime, the storage of DNA information has evolved considerably. Namely, Stéphane Lemaire and I founded the start-up Biomemory, which Kaspar came to visit. He left with precise specifications: his file had to be no larger than one kilobyte.

Kaspar, what challenges did you encounter during the creative process? How did you overcome them?

K.R. : One of the difficulties was ensuring the legibility of DNA on a microscopic scale, given that we were encoding geographic coordinates on a DNA molecule. I had some reservations about legibility in a post-nuclear scenario. That said, when I spoke to Pierre about it, he said something that made a lot of sense to me: as long as humanity exists, there will always be people dedicated to the study of life. And I imagine that those who study the question of life on Earth will inevitably come up against DNA.

What is your vision of the interaction between digital art and scientific issues such as nuclear power?

K.R. : Though I'm far from being the only one to tackle the nuclear issue, I think it's important for the art world to take up these questions. On the other hand, I also find it an ambiguous terrain. As with many subjects that are still healing the scars of the past, you have to be able to distinguish, in artistic practices, between the aestheticization of history and a critical-artistic stance on nuclear technologies.
To answer your question, it's crucial that this interaction be imbued with a political consciousness. By this, I don't mean reviving public debate, but rather raising questions that sometimes only art can afford to ask.

P.C. : I myself come from a family of artists. A few years ago, I had a conversation with my artist cousin who told me: "Art is research into life." As researchers, we research mechanisms. The convergence is obvious, especially when it comes to ethical issues. Even if Kaspar chose the nuclear theme for reasons other than ethical, like the subject of long-term memory.
In any case, we still need to enrich ourselves through this kind of interaction, which I don't think we do enough of. Despite our efforts at interdisciplinarity, even between researchers, the language is sometimes different, so with an artist, there's a real big gap. I find that very interesting!

In your opinion, Pierre, how can this artistic residency enrich our understanding of nuclear issues?

P.C. : Maybe I'm being too scientific, but in my opinion, there aren't really any major issues with nuclear. So, yes, a nuclear waste storage site is dangerous, but by burying it 100 meters underground, the problem is solved. We live surrounded by far more dangerous things. For example, in the laboratory, we handle phenol, which is far more toxic than radioactivity. I think this is simply an irrational fear. After all, there's only been one high-impact nuclear incident in the world: Chernobyl. Fukushima comes to mind, but it wasn't the plant incident that caused the casualties, it was the tsunami.
However, if it can help dispel misconceptions about nuclear issues, why not, but Kaspar's subject is more about the transmission of memory.
Finally, the whole point of having an artist in residence at Sorbonne University is to bring in a different point of view from our own, which will give us new food for thought. It's very constructive!

How do you view the role of the collaboration between artists and scientists in disseminating knowledge to the public?

P.C. : It's a huge asset! The example of nuclear power shows that there is still a lot of ignorance among the general public. These are very complex concepts to explain. Artists, through their creativity, can ask questions that the general public is also often asking. Through their art, they can make these subjects accessible to a wider and more diverse public.

And you, Kaspar, what message do you hope to convey with this new year of artistic residency?

K.R. : Through my work, my goal is to reveal the many facets of nuclear culture. How can we live in a world in which nuclear power is omnipresent? Each of my creations is an attempt to answer this question and offer nuanced perspectives on the subject.