Between every Pop!Tech session we show some of the coolest video interstitials as a mental sorbet of sorts. We look for music videos, advertisements or video art pieces that have caught our eye for their stunning visuals, social commentary or just plain hilarity.

One group that we consistently turn to for video fodder, and often meet all the above criteria, is the Paris collective, Pleix. They are relatively well known now, (Their piece, Birds, circulated like made around the web) but the individuals behind Pleix remains a mystery to many.

At the recent ENSAD conference in Paris, Eric Augier, one of the artists of Pleix, took the spotlight to share their personal and commercial work. An overview of some of their works is given here.

Here is a description of the Netlag project which we showed at the 2006 Pop!Tech.

In 2004, they created another project especially for the Ferme du Buisson: Netlag. The first step was to develop a custom-built software that grabs on the internet movies from surveillance webcams all around the world (up to 3000 webcams because of the limitations of the program). One frame every 10 minutes was then recorded during a 24-hour span in January 2004. The films were then mapped on a representation of the world, the images were accelerated to give a better feeling of their night/day evolution and the result is pretty impressive: the African continent is nearly invisible while certain European countries and the US appear to be very active because, as we know it, surveillance is pretty well developed there.

What makes the work even more fascinating is that it was conceived before the launch of Google Earth.

The idea attracted the interest of the commercial world. Adidas bought the right to reproduce the concept for a year. They used the money to finance other “personal” projects.

via:: We Make Money Not Art