PHOTOGRAPHY
with Natacha Lesueur
Last minute risk As the students enter their final year of training at the ECAL, and their interests and methods take shape, it's time to take advantage of this last project to question our own rules, achievements and influences, not to be satisfied with them, and to take risks.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Olivia Schenker
Hot N Cold By making a very short film, students learn fundamental notions in the narrative, visual and conceptual development of video production. The project provides essential technical skills in shooting, lighting, camera movement, sound recording, editing and post-production.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Laurence Bonvin
Liquid Times Produce a project using photography and video on the theme of fluidity, liquid form and water.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Natacha Lesueur
Documentary, the power of make-believe. Based on projects developed around a common theme, the students develop a personal, in-depth project around the theme of pretense. They build a project that plays with the limits of veracity in photography, using it as an artifice of deception.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Calypso Mahieu
Waliking in Renens A collaborative project in which students were asked to choose a local shop in Renens and to create a documentary project combining images of still life, architecture and portraits.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Orsola Valenti
Hors-champ “Showing by hiding, revealing by stealing": for a political practice of the audiovisual image. The main aim of the course is to raise awareness of the political dimension of the audiovisual gesture and give students the tools to distinguish the cinematographic image from the media image. Whereas the latter - flattened, emptied and therefore interchangeable - overwhelms its receptor, rendering it powerless, the cinematographic image liberates emotion and critical reflection. In this way, it goes beyond the supposedly faithful representation of reality.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Laurence Bonvin
Endurance In this course, the objectives are to allow students to experiment with new approaches or techniques regarding past, ongoing, or diploma projects. They also have the opportunity to revisit and refine subjects that have not met their satisfaction in terms of concept, form, technique, or execution. This experience aims to expand ideas, refine techniques, continue unfinished work while improving it, or build a more comprehensive body of images. Endurance lies at the heart of this process, whether it's persevering in completing a project, revisiting an idea until it's exhausted, or overcoming obstacles such as lack of time, self-confidence, or courage. This semester thus offers students the opportunity to confront their limits, surpass them, and achieve their best in their endeavors.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Natacha Lesueur
Seduce, they said Based on projects developed around the theme of seduction, students develop a personal, in-depth project over the whole semester.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Matthieu Gafsou
The workshop week 4x5 is both an introduction to the 4x5 technical camera and a way to kickstart a photographic project. Students experience the process of analog shooting, from development to large format printing. This intense week is highly technical, but also focused on developing a photographic language, allowing for a better understanding of the fundamental workings of photography.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Matthieu Gafsou
The collaboration between the ECAL and the BLI touches on contemporary issues that are of particular concern to students at the school: our relationship with minorities and the appropriate way of representing them. For a long time, a paternalistic anthropological attitude was tolerated and even encouraged in the world of photography. Attitudes have changed, and the young artists at the ECAL have developed a relationship of equals with the various communities they have encountered. Creating the images required a language that enabled the students to position themselves in relation to others and to establish protocols in line with their own values and those of the people on the other side of the lens. The images give us a complex, multifaceted panorama of our city's cultural diversity, and show us that encounters and mixes are possible and fruitful. Matthieu Gafsou, photographer and teacher.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Natacha Lesueur
Seduce, they said Based on projects developed around the theme of seduction, students develop a personal, in-depth project over the whole semester.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Orsola Valenti
Image, sound and politics: how to raise the image The main aim of the course is to stimulate reflection on the audiovisual gesture. By confronting students with the complexity of audiovisual creation and its compositional dimension (image and sound, space and time, frame and rhythm, body and set), they are encouraged to grasp its richness and potential.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Matthieu Gafsou
The workshop week 4x5 is both an introduction to the 4x5 technical camera and a way to kickstart a photographic project. Students experience the process of analog shooting, from development to large format printing. This intense week is highly technical, but also focused on developing a photographic language, allowing for a better understanding of the fundamental workings of photography.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Matthieu Gafsou
In the second year, the course Photographic Essays course enables students to exercise a documentary photographic practice –one based on a relationship with reality, with something anchored in the here and now. This year, students worked on a theme related to ecology in the broadest sense: a very specific, concrete starting point (a permaculture garden, Extinction Rebellion activists, documentation of polluted sites, encounters with people working with more-than-human animals), a broader, multiple or personal approach.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Laurence Bonvin
For two semesters, second-year students developped projects related to the thematic Reclaiming Water. They were invited to question and procuce images in relation to the countless political, social, economic, human and environmental issues linked to water. Who owns it? Is it a common good or a marketable resource? How can we visually address these issues?
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Laurence Bonvin
During the first semester of the third year, this course enables students to take up a project they have already started, which could be continued in the second semester for the diploma. Students are encouraged to take risks in form, technique, production or subject matter.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Natacha Lesueur
Over the course of a semester, the students develop a project that examines the challenges of auteur photography and develops their personal expression. The project may be continued as a diploma project in the second semester.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Mara Wohlfahrt
Algae represent our past, our present and our future. They are at the origin of life on Earth and supply us with 70% of our oxygen. They are capable of transforming and thus replacing most of the products that represent a threat to the survival of our planet, such as plastics, fabrics and fuels. Atelier LUMA, a design and research laboratory based in Arles, is looking for ways to transform algae into a material that can be used in the field of creation. Since algae is still considered insignificant and sometimes even repulsive, the Algae in posterum project hopes, through collaboration with Atelier LUMA, to enhance this almost alchemical, even magical dimension of algae for the future of the creative field.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Spectacle·s Museum looks at the photographs of visitors in a museum space. Through a web atlas, this project paints a series of portraits in one of the most photographed museums in the world, the Louvre. Using images published on Instagram, the project classifies and groups them according to their formal and spatial specificities. Through Spectacle·s Museum, I approach the theme of the staging of the self, particularly in the museum space.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Per Aspera Ad Astra is a web-documentary that tells the story of five women astronomers who were in charge of discovering, calculating, classifying and mapping the cosmos between 1879 and 1979. This project aims to rehabilitate the crucial contribution made by women in STEM. In the early days, before the word “computer” was used to describe a machine, it was in actual fact used to describe a person, namely the women who made calculations and observations by hand. The “Harvard Computers” significantly contributed to astronomy and science by discovering many galaxies and establishing the stellar classification system that is still in use today. Nowadays, however, we speak very little about these five women; their work remains unknown, and their discoveries have often been attributed to the men who employed them. per-aspera-ad-astra.vercel.app
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Nicole Udry
Create a communication of a chosen building (a school, a religious space, an office building, a theater, etc.). Second year course of graphic design in context, centered on image creation and editorial design.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Isabel Garcia Argos
Voz (voice in Spanish) is an audio-visual project that aims to make these voices heard by the public in order to raise awareness of the issue. Through four fictional yet likely stories, this series take us into the intimacy and feelings of women survivors. The narrative style and the visual universe contrast with the real cruelty of the images and language.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Guillaume Besson
This project is a documentation and analysis of surveillance equipment in contemporary society, using the airport as a metaphorical object.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Adeline Vermot
This project is an analysis of gender representation in contemporary popular cinema. The choice of films was based on the ones that were the most successful at the box office. I was interested to see the messages they conveyed, as they had been seen by a large number of people. The choice was also based on French cinema since Hollywood has already dealt with these issues a lot. To do this, a system was established to compare the six films with each other as well as the situation of men and women. The content is in the form of images and dialogues from these films and is supplemented with infographics and texts. The result shows how strong stereotypes still are and that being aware of them is a first step towards deconstructing them.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Confessionnal is a web app that enables users to anonymously confess their behaviour on social networks. With the advent of social media years ago, the behaviour of users varies. Unmentionable acts are sometimes committed on these platforms. This project is inspired by the Catholic confessional as we know it but is based on the digital era we live in. Users live the anonymous experience with a mask as participants or spectators. They confess orally and personalise their mask based on their age, the platform or the main subject of the confession. On the other hand, they can observe other masks and listen to the confessions of other users.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Is This the Middle East? investigates representation of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in a selection of video games. I am interested in the patterns, repetitive artefacts, locations and texts in games that claim to be set in the MENA region. These objects become archetypes. Are these photo-realistic environments also realistic in the scenes they depict or do they become another backdrop for war-related games? Using photogrammetry to reconstruct these environments, I address the implications of seeing an abundance of often over-simplified images of the Middle East, especially in a world where video games are becoming not only a global phenomenon, but also a means to encounter other cultures.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Nicole Udry
Create a communication of a chosen building (a school, a religious space, an office building, a theater, etc.). Second year course of graphic design in context, centered on image creation and editorial design.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Laurence Bonvin
How can we move from the two-dimensionality of the image to the multi-dimensionality of the experience ? How can we introduce notions of space, volume, tactility and sensuality into images and the way they are presented ? If images can allow us to create new links with the world, how can we possibly move away from an essentially technically based vision, a perspectivist and anthropocentric vision ? How can we imagine and represent what a representation detached from our human point of view would be ? In our culture a separation has been established between culture and nature. This dichotomy has determined the way we see, understand and represent the world around us. How can we create images of the living, of "nature" that go beyond this distinction and this point of view ? Images that contribute to recreating a link with what is nonhuman: the plant, the mineral, the animal, the cosmic. What does an animal, a plant, an object, a tree, the earth feel and perceive ?
FILM STUDIES
with Pedro Pinho
A cinematographic necromancy calls the spectres of the past: by the means of VHS find the spectator submerges into the Berlin family's intimate play of the author's childhood. gomezalvarez@gmx.de http://www.elisagomezalvarez.com
FILM STUDIES
by Nina Defontaine
The portrait of Monique (my grandmother) as i accompany her in the great sorting of her objects (her ghosts) at her family house (Clémente). ninadefontaine@gmail.com https://cargocollective.com/ninaphotographies/cinematographie
FILM STUDIES
with Laurent Larivière
At dawn, a cannon shatters the silence. The horses gallop across the beaten ground. Eva, 21, wants to join the Imperial HorseGuards, a historical reenactment of a Napoleonic regiment reserved for men.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
In 2020, with the emergence of Covid-19, people self-quarantined. For many this was an opportunity to reflect on their situation. Lockdown Memorial Archive enables anyone to share their story about the confinement and to become aware of the feelings of others. Through a web app, participants are invited to personalise an emblematic object and to link it to an account of their experience. The overall result thus constitutes an archive made up of several immersive memorials where one can relive this situation of isolation in a different way.
FILM STUDIES
by Natasha Degrandi
At dawn, a cannon shatters the silence. The horses gallop across the beaten ground. Eva, 21, wants to join the Imperial HorseGuards, a historical reenactment of a Napoleonic regiment reserved for men.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
“Lasius Flavus” is an immersive and didactic experience developed in collaboration with the Museum of Zoology. Throughout the tour, visitors discover the world of the yellow ant, its habitat and perception of the world. This interactive VR project offers an interpretation of these various aspects to lead us to reflect on the relationship that each species has with its environment. Moreover, the exercise of thinking on a scale that is not ours can help us question our own future.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Pauline Saglio
Conflicts of interests are often at the heart of issues like democratic or environmental crises. However, in today’s information landscape, we massively get and forget those bits of data. With an open and collaborative approach, relations.watch aims to summarise relations between people, companies, media, etc. so as to enable anyone to quickly discover potential conflicts of interests. One of the most challenging aspects of this project is to convey very dense semantic data in a visually simple and interactive way while staying as neutral as possible on highly political topics. relations.watch
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Pauline Saglio
Ordinary places are those corners of streets or that deserted bench that you can see from your window… They are spaces that we can reclaim and that narrate our everyday lives. They are neither places nor monuments but have their own stories. The surveillance cameras that increasingly scan our landscapes are opening up a new projection on these common places. From this medium I tell evolutionary stories (from the present) of indefinite duration. Juxtaposed, the camera images are edited live to form a unique narrative sequence. lieuxordinaires.live
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Pauline Saglio
Light pollution is a nuisance that humans don’t notice. But it disrupts the eco-system of thousands of species. The objective of my project is to turn off night lighting in rural areas. It is composed of three tools, a DIY geolocated luxmeter to measure the pollution of its village, a DIY box to place under a streetlight that allows to alert the municipality, and the website that gathers the collected information and that also serves as a support to mobilize people. This project has shown me how I can help in important causes. zerolux-e.org
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Pauline Saglio
Plug-in allows you to discover and enjoy music content in an original way at any time and in any place. The consumption of sound is affiliated with the environment in which it is found, creating an intimate and individual listening context linked to common places. The ambiguity of the object will allow the most curious to discover its exclusive content, combining private speeches and public music. Designed to promote a musical event such as a festival, it offers a tangible and different way of sharing and communication.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Pauline Saglio, Vincent Jacquier, Laura Nieder
Information Mesh is a web platform celebrating the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web that explores social, technical, cultural and legal facts throughout different interactive timelines. It was initiated in October 2018 during a one week workshop in partnership with swissnex San Francisco, where students visited key partners and began developing the project. The timelines present an overview of Web history, starting with the proposal for hypertext by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989, initially under the name “Information Mesh.” From this start date, users can then explore 30 years of evolution. infomesh.org
FILM STUDIES
with Olivier Loustau, Alain Gomis
Mia, a former trapeze artist from Florida finds herself at the head of a small circus with her husband in German-speaking Switzerland. Despite an exhausting nomadic lifestyle, Mia has faith in the circus tradition and patience while passing on this cultural heritage to her daughter Simone.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Jonas Marguet, Milo Keller
From Lavaux to the Chablais region of Vaud, the world of wine was reinterpreted for a semester by students in their 2nd year of the Bachelor of Photography programme at ECAL/Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne, in collaboration with the Confrérie des Vignerons. Under the guidance of Jonas Marguet, photographer and teacher, the students used clues gathered in the field from the winegrowers. Selected and presented as part of the Festival Images Vevey, Elisa Ribeiro's 'Nuisibles' series sheds light on an unexpected aspect of winegrowing. She paints a gallery of portraits of insects that ravage vines, using a scanning electron microscope. By reappropriating a scientific tool for artistic purposes, she reveals the extraordinary, invisible to the naked eye. This work questions the very foundations of the photographic image, the process of taking the picture being carried out here by means of a beam of electrons. These tiny pests appear like giant monsters, presented in large light boxes that evoke the illumination of microscopic observation. Musée de la Confrérie des Vignerons Rue du Château 2 1800 Vevey www.confreriedesvignerons.ch www.images.ch
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto, Cyril Diagne, Vincent Jacquier
Timeline 125 is an interactive timeline for the 125th anniversary of Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne. The project is developed in collaboration with 1st year students in BA Media & Interaction Design.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Cyril Diagne, Cédric Duchêne, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo
The Ptolemy Mission is an interactive installation that encourages to experience the excitement of exploration by taking a look at everyday things from a different perspective. The project originated from my passion for the Space Exploration and my admiration of the beauty of the Universe. I wanted to show that ordinary objects we hold in our hands and think of them as simple and familiar can, in reality, be far from our understanding, like remote planets observed through a telescope. Exploring such ordinary objects can be as fascinating and surprising as exploring faraway planets.
FILM STUDIES
by Alain Guillebeau
I lost my father at the age of two - too young to have kept any memories. For many years this loss haunted only my sub consciousness. Thirty years after his death, his grave was destroyed. I suddenly realize that I had never mourned my father and that I had to find out who he really was...
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Cyril Diagne, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo
Postgram is my personal automated online bot dedicated to the practice of “fair hacking”. Using an @post.gram instagram account, each time a photo is published, the bot uses geolocalisation data to seek someone living close by, using a public directory. Once someone has been found, he/she is automatically added as a new contact in my phone and is sent a printed postcard of the image. New contacts are notified of the postcard with a suggestion to meet and film the encounter. Postgram counterposes public data and image making, using a process of “fair hacking” of public services.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Vincent Jacquier
Beijing Connexion is a web platform hosting projects realized during a one week journey in Beijing with 15 students. Our objectives were to work around the topic of quantified self, data logging and also on a reflection about regular picture and movie that people usually records during their own journey. To realize precisely those projects we had to perform 24 hours per day to get our datas and visual materials. We kindly thank the “Summer University” program of the Canton of Vaud who made this possible and also all the people who welcomed us at Tsinghua University, CAFA University and the Beijing Maker Space. beijing-connection.ecal-mid.ch
FILM STUDIES
with Lionel Baier, Kaveh Bakhtiari
The first year Bachelor Cinema class of ECAL went round Istanbul during a whole week, accompanied by the director Kaveh Bakhtiari.
FILM STUDIES
with Denis Gheerbrant
This is the testimonial of a friendship between the director and his friend Mirko, with whom he spent his childhood playing with "Playmobil"-figures in a fantasy world.
FILM STUDIES
with Denis Gheerbrant
Happyland, an amusement park in Switzerland, surrounded by mountains. A film on the people who work there, two women: one young and the other less so.
FILM STUDIES
with Frédéric Mermoud
Stéphane Lambiel is a famous figure skater and a two-time world champion. Today, he goes from galas to galas on a weekly basis. The little prince in the land that passes by draws an intimate portrait of this young man by showing the life behind the stardom status.