Maurice Benayoun: Digital Artist Transforming Cities into Screens

Maurice Benayoun (born 1957 in Mascara, Algeria) studied new media at the Sorbonne and pioneered digital art. In the 1990s, his installation "The Tunnel under the Atlantic" established the first official internet link between the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, merging audiences from both cities through a virtual tunnel. This work was later repeated between Paris and Delhi. His virtual reality videogame "World Skin - Digital Safari" critiques how photography consumes reality within media circuits, set in an interactive war zone. Benayoun's series "Mechanics of Emotion" quantifies thoughts and emotions by recording web flows, producing visual cartographies where color intensities represent communication volumes. Works like "Brain Factory," "Emotion Winds," and "SFear" materialize immaterial data as design objects. In New York, his "Occupy Wall Screen" at Times Square's Screen Plaza transforms Wall Street ratings into abstract projections. Currently based in Hong Kong, he teaches at the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong and curates digital artworks for a luminous tower in Kowloon, alternating works from museums, international digital artists, and young Chinese creators.