Mélanie Courtinat (FR, 1993)
Residency period: January-March 2027
Mélanie Courtinat is a Paris-based digital artist whose practice explores new technologies to create immersive and interactive worlds, primarily through virtual reality and game engines, a medium she has been working with for more than a decade.
Represented by New Galerie (Paris), her work has been shown internationally in contexts ranging from the Venice Immersive Biennale and LISTE Art Basel to Gray Area (San Francisco) and the Tokyo Game Show. Alongside her artistic practice, she teaches video game theory at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne and virtual reality at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.
During her residency at La Becque, Mélanie Courtinat will develop RISE AND GRIND, a management video game adopting the genre’s classic mechanics: gathering resources, building infrastructure, and producing ever more. Soon, a flaw appears: resources do not regenerate, each action depletes the world, and optimization only hastens collapse. An alternative then emerges: doing nothing, waiting, listening to the environment rather than exploiting it. By subverting the genre’s codes and embracing a frugal, sustainable, and environmentally conscious “permacomputing” approach, the project questions productivist reflexes and opens the possibility of cultivating more attentive relationships with technology and with nature.
Melanie Courtinat, photo Lou Fauroux