It is sometimes complex to separate the personal work from the commissioned, because the two overlap and feed off each other. Besides, Mélanie Courtinat is given on a regular basis by institutions or even brands a complete "carte blanche". This selection therefore presents her most unrestricted projects, and those that resonate the most with her work as an artist.

ALL UNSAVED PROGRESS WILL BE LOST
Virtual reality, 6DoF, 10’

YEAR 2022
ART DIRECTION, PRODUCTION, DEVELOPMENT Mélanie Courtinat
ORIGINAL MUSIC Yatoni
DISTRIBUTION Diversion Cinema

Certain historical events defy representation; they offer no analogies, no precedents in experience. These are catastrophes of a new kind, for which our eyes, our ears, and even our language remain unprepared.

All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost is a sensorial journey that explores our deepest fears and resilience in the face of unimaginable horrors, through the story of a survivor who chose not to evacuate her home. Voluntarily confined to a space rendered inhospitable, she recounts her vision of the disaster in a surreal landscape made of concrete and fog—a portrayal of a land where no return to origins is possible.

It is only in the final moments that the nature of this calamity is disclosed, yet without this knowledge, the looming threat remains silent, unnamed, inviting viewers to confront their own anxieties about possible future catastrophes.

Premiered in 2022 at the Venice Biennale within the Immersive Selection, the project has since been showcased over twenty times in exhibitions and festivals worldwide. That same year, it was distinguished with the Best VR Award at Animafest Zagreb.







THE SIREN
Video game, immersive installation

YEAR 2024
ART DIRECTION, PRODUCTION Mélanie Courtinat
CURATION Victoria Mühlig
DEVELOPMENT Mélanie Courtinat, Alpha Rats, Alex Sinh Nguyen
MUSIC Inès Chérifi at Færies Records, Yatoni


The Siren is a digital exploration that questions the traditional conventions of video games. The work probes the meaning we assign to actions within a game, the motivations behind our playful engagements, and aims to eventually introduce an art exhibition public to the medium.

This inclusive approach is designed to be accessible to everyone, including newcomers, while also providing an additional level of understanding for those already acquainted with video games. As a result, the piece features accessible gameplay and incorporates a so-called 'cinematic' dimension, thus offering a rich visual experience for those who prefer to watch.

In The Siren, players embody a heroine wearing a shimmering armor who initially wanders aimlessly along a beach at dusk. Once in control, players quickly engage in actions under the watchful eye of an omniscient narrator. This narrator prompts players to undertake a seemingly arbitrary task—or side quest—of collecting bioluminescent seashells scattered across the sand, before being allowed to move on to the main quest: the rescue of a damsel in distress.
The player's interaction, especially through multiple-choice dialogues with the narrator, influences the unfolding of the story and can trigger multiple distinct endings, depending on players interpretation and conscious choices.

[The Siren was commissioned by the Pully Art Museum as part of their exhibition Vivre l’œuvre / Voyage aux frontières de l’art immersif contemporain.]











I’M NOT TOUGH ENOUGH TO BE ONLINE ___ MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

CGI images, 3D scan

YEAR 2023
ART DIRECTION Mélanie Courtinat, Salomé Chatriot

CGI Mélanie Courtinat
STYLING Salomé Poloudenny
3D SCANS Pierre Moulin, Nino Filiu
MUA Nora Le Dour
CHAINMAIL, JEWELRY Milari Barker (Membrane)

Conceived by Mélanie Courtinat and Salomé Chatriot, this fashion series for issue 40 of Magazine magazine explores the worlds of these two artists through a series of images featuring characteristic elements of their styles and practices.

Serving as models, their bodies were captured through 3D scanning, allowing for their transposition into a virtual universe integrated within Unreal Engine video game software. The sets are entirely CGI, crafted not with the intention of achieving photorealism, but to evoke a sense of ambiguity—celebrating the imperfections of the scans rather than concealing them.







TEN LANDS

Video game, interactive videoclip

YEAR 2020
ART DIRECTION, CGI, PRODUCTION Mélanie Courtinat
ORIGINAL MUSIC, SOUND DESIGN Yatoni

Ten Lands is a hybrid format that oscillates between an interactive video clip and a video game. Each level visually illustrates one of the ten ambient music tracks from Yatoni‘s latest album.

Ten Lands opens, in an underlying way, a double reflexion that crosses both the video game industry and the music industry. This reflexion took place in times where the idea of sound resonated with difficulty in public places, at a time where gatherings were forbidden. It raises the question of new places and new ways of listening to music, far from clubs and concerts.
With Ten Lands, the artist seeks to draw a new diagonal that links the two disciplines of video games and videoclips. By recovering the interactive format of one and the stakes of the other, Ten Lands is a hybrid format in which each sound composition unfolds in relation to a specific virtual place. Landscapes and sounds happen simultaneously. One resonates with the other.

From then on, Ten Lands raises the issue of spatiality when listening to an album. Here the logics of unfolding the musical titles differ from those already in place, especially on streaming platforms such as Spotify or Soundcloud. Indeed, where one click is enough to start the next track, Ten Lands requires a journey.
By including the notion of space, distance and thus chronology, Ten Lands initiates a new logic of filiation when listening to a music album; close to the one, in particular, that animates the vinyl record. In fact, in the same way that the vinyl record requires listening to music one after the other, this new format requires that steps be taken in order to unroll the musical thread, unlike platforms that follow a logic of "deferred" listening, and the possibility of a disorderly discover. Here, this format pushes and gives you the opportunity to go through, literally, Yatoni's album.

Moreover and from another perspective, the artist also made the choice not to always do so. There is one unique entity to browse the ten worlds of Ten Lands. The avatar imagined by the artist is characterized above all by its anonymity. His thick opaque metal armor hides his face but also his gender. Mute, neither his voice nor his gait betray his identity. It is therefore impossible to know his features or the color of his skin. The protagonist of Ten Lands is an avatar who wants to be inclusive, so that anyone can take it over.