This artwork is part of a diptych for a public building in Roubaix.

The two works of this diptych are located in a former spinning mill converted into a public building. They highlight references and cross-references to art history (the minimalists Carl Andre and Donald Judd), kinetic art of the 1970s, the first industrial loom invented in England, the history of the site itself and its uses, and the architecture of the new building extension, created to expand the spaces for this National School for the Judicial Protection of Youth (ENPJJ).

The energy produced by the photovoltaic wall artwork is consumed in real time by the building, in what I call a work of “inverted light.”

An electric meter is read annually, and the number of kilowatts produced by this artwork is fed back into the software managing the Fading Jenny 0 to 10O light installation, which distributes it into 2-hour blocks for the following year. The versatile and generative light installation can, depending on the random subroutine launched in blocks, exhaust its energy quota before the end of a block and therefore remain inactive, switched off until the start of the next 2-hour block.

The brown photovoltaic panels used are positioned at slightly different angles to create a range of hues as seen from the atrium. Up close, the surface appears more homogeneous and reflective. It becomes a mirror reflecting the sky at the top of the stairs, with varying degrees of reflection depending on the viewing angle and the sun’s position. The randomness here is therefore remote, analog, and climatic (whereas it is generative and digital in the electrified light installation in the vestibule).

The PV wall was created not only to energetically compensate for fading jenny 0 to 100, but also to overcome a roof plan error and thus mask, like a screen, a set of ventilation machinery that was unintentionally visible from the atrium.