Antoine Schmitt
Antoine Schmitt (born 1961 in Strasbourg, France) is a French contemporary artist, programming engineer and designer. Biography. Antoine Schmitt was a self-made programmer at the age of 16. After earning his engineer diploma from the Telecom Paris in 1984, he worked as programming engineer specialised in artificial intelligence and human-machine interactions, in Paris, especially for the company Act Informatique for five years (1985–1991), and in Silicon Valley as an R&D engineer for the NeXT company with Steve Jobs for three years (1991–1994). He has been technical assistant to the film-maker Chris Marker, and collaborated with  the companies Hyptique, Incandescence, Virtools, the BBC and more recently with violet. He creates specialised software, especially Xtras (plugins) of Adobe Director, like the asFFT Xtra. Since 1994, he has worked as a visual artist, recognised by numerous awards and exhibitions. Artist of the movement, digital artist, Schmitt develops his work around the notion of shapes "programmed to be free". His artworks, minimal, abstract and efficient, tackle contemporary or intemporal themes like the condition of being free, the systems of reality or the forces and their shape. He places programming, an artistic medium that he considers as radically new because  of its active dimension, at the heart of the majority of his creations. Using techniques coming from artificial life and intelligence, influenced by philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches, Schmitt crafts objects or situations, generative or interactive physical, visual or audio systems, which question the modalities of the free human being in a complex world. Also, alone or though collaborations, Schmitt confronts his approach with more established artistic fields like dance, music, cinema, architecture or literature, and revisits their codes. In 1995, he publishes "puppetsprite 1", first artistic CD-rom, with the visual artist Alberto Sorbelli. In 1997, under the pseudo Georges  Victor, he launches the olalaParis mailing-list of artistic events, the first, still active, mailing-list of contemporary art in France. In 1998, he publishes with Jean-Jacques Birgé, "Machiavel", interactive behavioural CD-Rom. In 1999, he is the author with Vincent Epplay of the "infinite CD for unlimited music", first CD-Rom of generative music. In 2000, he founds the web portal gratin.org, Groupe de Recherche en Art et Technologies Interactives et/ou Numériques, a reference in programmed art. In 2003, the company violet handles him the design of the behaviour of the Dal lamp. Since then, he designs  the infra-verbal behaviour and the visual languages of all the objects of the violet company: the Nabaztag rabbit, the mir:ror, dal:dal, etc... In 2004, he launches with Adrian Johnson the sonicobject label, first label of original mobile phone ringtones, gathering 16 contemporary composers and 200 ringtones downloadable under Creative Commons licence.