©Les Nivaux, Cross the Scan - Abbey road, photograph 8.30x4.02m.

It is to bring to life the scene of the pedestrian crossing made famous by the Beatles around the world.

The work is a high definition photograph, of the most famous passages pedestrian. Printed at full size and glued to the ground in exact orientation, the artists invite the public to walk on the work, in the footsteps of the Beatles, to live their own journey by immortalizing it, photographing it and sharing it... as they do every day in London hundreds of enthusiasts from all over the world.

A true open, participatory and reflective work, Cross the Scan - Abbey Road revolutionizes the work / public relationship. It offers itself to the public as a stage open to free crossing, free expression and free dissemination. and makes the viewer an actor, creator and broadcaster. It sometimes becomes the time of an event a real stage for performers, dancers...

Questioning both the status of reality and the hyperpresence of the subject in photography, Cross the Scan / Abbey Road also questions social phenomena such as fan attitude and these places that have become essential pilgrimages. The Nivaux invite us to a sociological and philosophical reflection on means of an eminently contemporary art, integrating current technologies, collective memory and new behaviors.

To perfect the copy/paste of the London scene, artists call on partners such as Viewsurf (European leader of the tourist webcam), to install a connected camera and broadcast the time of the exhibition, the new Abbey road H24 stage, as is the case in London.

©Les Nivaux, Exhibition during the Nuit Blanche Paris 2016 & Avignon Festival Parcours de l'artl, 2018

Cross the Scan

Abbey Road

2 nights, 420 scans, 75 hours of assembly and a photograph of more than 32 M2.

A real performance ! It took 2 nights of work in London, 420 scans, 75 hours of assembly, a file size of 30 GB... to produce this monumental work of more than 32 M2 (8.30x4.02m)

The scanner, by its potentialities, brings to photography a tactile dimension and an extreme precision capturing the smallest elements of the material.

Then printed on a special support and stuck on the floor of various exhibition places influences the meaning and scope of the work. A dialogue begins between the work and the floors on which the artists decide to stick it. A layering of stories, a new story...

By scanning the collective memory, Les Nivaux makes us walk in the footsteps of our collective history by reactivating this Common DNA that unites us.