Adrien Mondot

Adrien Mondot, born in 1979 in Grenoble, France, is a multidisciplinary artist, computer engineer and juggler who pioneered a hybrid practice merging digital technology with live performance. Trained in computer science, Mondot spent three years as a researcher at INRIA in Grenoble while practicing juggling—a dual formation that became the foundation for his distinctive artistic language. He designed software capable of generating images responsive enough to share timing and space with a live performer's body.

In 2004, Mondot founded Compagnie Adrien M and created *Convergence 1.0*, a project combining juggling and computing that was recognized through the Jeunes Talents Cirque program. He subsequently developed the eMotion software environment, using real-time rules and physical models to give projected forms apparent gravity, elasticity and momentum. The 2009 work *Cinématique* expanded this research into a stage language of moving points, lines and virtual surfaces, receiving the jury's Grand Prix in the Dance and New Technologies competition at Bains Numériques. In these works, performers do not dance in front of a screen but rather their actions appear to disturb, follow or be constrained by an image-space generated live.

In 2011, Mondot and visual artist Claire Bardainne co-founded the company Adrien M & Claire B, placing the human at the center of technological questions and the body at the center of images. Their 2013 work *Hakanaï* places a solo dancer within a cube of projected imagery whose performance system responds in real time, creating a shifting relation among bodily gesture, translucent surfaces and apparent digital matter. Dancers across the work's performance history include Akiko Kajihara, Francesca Ziviani, Satchie Noro and Virginie Barjonet.

In 2014, Mondot and Bardainne collaborated with choreographer Mourad Merzouki on *Pixel*, a work for eleven dancers that integrates hip-hop and contemporary movement with responsive light and projection. Later performances, exhibitions and installations continued to explore air, touch, shadow and virtual transformation. Mondot's contribution to dance is a new kind of scenographic partner: software-generated images with which a body can negotiate rather than a fixed background.