Once a year, there is an art celebration that takes place between midnight and six AM in towns all over France. It’s called Nuit Blanche–the French term for all-nighter. Artists set up installations all over the city, and you never know what you’ll run into.

I met up with some architects from Georgia Tech that were just starting an exchange program here in Paris as well as a handful of guys from Georgia Tech Lorraine. It made for a pretty big group: around 10 people in all. They were all still starry-eyed.

I was expecting to bump into installations splayed onto the street while moving through the part of town where the event was centered. However, it turned out that it was very much more organized that that: you had to wait in queues to get into places with art. Almost every one of them we found took about half an hour. This was sort of disappointing, but not at all surprising: remember that we’re in France.

Les Oeuvres

One exhibit we saw was a ring of speakers in church. Each of the speakers played the part of one singer in a choir. You stood in the middle of the ring. Cathedrals render me cynical. I can’t help but think of the hunger and sweat that went into their construction: a construction at the whims of a priestly ruling class. I found myself thinking of Marcus Aurelius in Meditations:

“To acquire indifference to pretty singing, to dancing, to the martial arts: Analyze the melody into the notes that form it, and as you hear each one, ask yourself whether you’re powerless against that. That should be enough to deter you.

The same with dancing: individual movement and tableaux. And the same with the martial arts.

And with everything—except virtue and what springs from it. Look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference.

Apply this to life as a whole.”

Another piece we saw was a laser bouncing off of a mirror. The laser started from the top of a clock tower, slid just past the wall of the open roof of the mosque we were in, and rebounded into the night sky. A voice track was playing in the background. I picked out most of the words, but I couldn’t come up with a cohesive theme. “Il y a trois cent quatre…Il y a trois mille ans…J’étais le boi…J’étais le fer…Je suis mort en Egypte.”

The most fun work of the night was a giant disco ball. That’s it really. We guesstimated that is was forty feet in diameter. Here is Quinn describing what it would be like if such an installation took place in Atlanta, Georgia: (click the link to watch it)

Interview with Quinn at Nuit Blanche

Transcript: “Whar my damn tax dollers goin to a friggin gah darn disco ball-I mean-I could just go out there with my gosh darn truck and turn on my high beams and get the same damn effect.”
(Not to poke too much fun at the South: I really do miss Southern hospitality, fried chicken, and ACC football.)

An ode to Vélib

Vélib: a municipal bike-sharing program. Automated stands are found throughout the city and anyone with the right kind of card can rent one of the bikes.

Vélib: how you get home from anywhere in the city after midnight.

Two of the architects from Georgia Tech (Rex and Quinn) and I live in the same part of town. Neither Rex nor Quinn had had the pleasure of taking Vélib back home after a late night. It turned out to be difficult to find bikes since everyone else in the city had left from where we were. We eventually found a stand with three bikes left. We mounted our steeds and pedaled into the night, only to realize that all three of our bikes were broken. Quinn’s couldn’t get out of first gear. My chain would pop on and off at random. Rex’s brakes were always on. We made it back eventually, orienting ourselves each time we passed one of the glowing maps on the street. At one point Rex almost swerved into some girls passing on a narrow street, they proceeded to make fun of us from riding Vélibs.

Of course, Vélib is one of my favorite parts of life in Paris.