Artists Take Up Digital Tools

Manipulating 3-D scans of his own body on the computer, Mr. Dupont then marries digital fabrication methods like rapid prototyping and computer numerically controlled milling with traditional plaster casting and other laborious hand work to make figures that can appear both archaic and futuristic. One of his standing nudes, similar in posture to the Kouros statues from ancient Greece, appears to melt into ripples when viewed on one axis, suggesting the psychic experience of man in the modern world.

“The forms I end up with couldn’t have been done without using digital tools, but you have to disrespect them on some level,” he said. “It’s much more interesting if you can disrupt the expectations of what the technology can do.”

His work is on view now in “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, an exhibition of works by 85 international artists, architects and designers including Frank Stella, Maya Lin, Daniel Libeskind, Ron Arad and Hiroshi Sugimoto, who are bending digital techniques to their own expressive ends.

“There’s been an explosion of creativity during the last decade as many artists are exploring the technologies and what boundaries they can push,” said the exhibition curator, Ronald Labaco. He notes that while some of the digital technology has been around since the 1990s, early practitioners approached it more as a novelty. “In recent years I’ve seen a shift in thinking from ‘What can the machine do?’ versus ‘How can I use this as part of the tool kit to achieve what I want to do?’ ”

For Chuck Close, known for his monumental portrait paintings transposed from photographs, the computer’s ability to convert images into data that can be read by an electronic loom got him deeply interested in the age-old medium of tapestry. In the exhibition, his 2009 digitally woven tapestry based on daguerreotypes of five angles of his own face looks almost like a holograph. The faces seem to emerge from the black matte background with a kind of aggressive clarity, an effect he loves.

While traditionally a tapestry might have taken a year or more to weave on the loom by hand, now it can be run off in a day. But the labor is shifted upfront. Mr. Close can spend a year creating a digital weave file on the computer that will direct the loom — establishing a palette with hundreds of steps from the lightest light to the darkest dark, changing thread colors and transitions, making test strips.

“It’s wonderfully complicated because you’re building an image,” said Mr. Close, who compared the process to both photography, in milking the contrast out of a negative in the darkroom, and painting, in mixing up lighter and darker colors. “I find these old-time systems — the daguerreotype and the loom — have real appeal and are something to breathe new life into.”

Many of the artists in the exhibition are playing with 3-D printing, a newer form of rapid prototyping that is beginning to be recognized by the general public with the advent of desktop 3-D printers and newsworthy developments in the medical field like the 3-D printing of a mouse heart capable of beating with electrodes attached.

“The technology allows you to design an object in virtual space and transmit the data to another machine to ‘grow’ or ‘print’ that object in 3-D,” the industrial designer Marc Newson said of these printers, which can dispense a variety of materials — plastics, metal powder and binders, plaster, animal cells — in very thin slices directed by a laser and build an object in layers.

The process allows for the seamless construction of incredibly intricate designs, including Mr. Newson’s 2006 “Random Pak Chair,” on view in the show, made from a perforated metal skin that mimics cellular structures. The physical fabrication of the chair was simplified through the technology, yet the design of its skin using generative software was more complex than anything Mr. Newson had previously done.

“With the assistance of the inventors of the technology, we used a series of algorithms that made billions of decisions about how to grow this object,” Mr. Newson said.

Ubisoft’s Montreal Studio, Where Artists Are Superheroes

Mr. Measroch, a lively 36-year-old sound-effects artist, spends his days figuring out how to make noises he’s never heard — like that of an 18th-century musket being loaded or the thump of someone’s skull hitting the deck of a warship. A selection of wooden flooring samples also helps him create the sounds of each character’s footfalls, no matter in what location, or century, they appear. “A big part of the job is footsteps,” he explains.

The footsteps belong to characters like Jason Brody, the protagonist of Far Cry 3, a best-selling first-person shooter game created by Ubisoft. The company is the world’s fourth-largest game maker, ranked by sales, after Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts and Nintendo, according to Michael Pachter, an industry analyst at Wedbush Securities. But Ubisoft’s video game production studio in Montreal, where Mr. Measroch works, is one of the world’s largest, with a staff of 2,500. It is here where an overwhelmingly male staff of writers, producers, coders, directors, animators, artists and others come together to create the fantasy worlds of games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, into which millions of people escape.

When people play a Ubisoft game, Mr. Measroch’s ingenuity has wedded the on-screen action with the sounds that make it feel authentic. This may be technologically sophisticated entertainment, but when a clanking pirate falls on a ship’s deck, the sound is actually Mr. Measroch banging a leather handbag with metal rings against a slab of wood. When wind rustles through tall grass, he’s gently waving the hula skirt in front of his microphone. Leaves shaking in a breeze? That’s him shaking the camouflage net.

The company is perhaps most admired for its games’ attention to detail — the historical accuracy of a swordfight in Renaissance Italy, for example, or the emotional nuance in a villain’s sneer. In 2012, Ubisoft was named best video game publisher by six industry groups at E3, the annual industry conference, and won the award for best technology for Far Cry 3 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March.

“When you play an E.A. game, it feels like the business people got the last word,” says Stephen Totilo, editor in chief of the video game Web site Kotaku (and an occasional game reviewer for The New York Times). “With Ubisoft, you can tell that the creative people did. It’s pretty clear they take far more creative risks, even in a sequel. They’re definitely putting art ahead of other companies.”

THE Montreal studio of Ubisoft fills a five-story red brick building, a former textile factory built in 1903 that covers a city block at the northern end of Boulevard St. Laurent.

The company is based in Rennes, France; it was founded by five brothers from Brittany in 1986. They opened the studio in Montreal in 1997, lured by generous tax credits. American competitors soon followed — Electronic Arts in 2004 and a Quebec division of Warner Brothers Games in 2008 — making Montreal a video game industry center.

The company takes pains to achieve authenticity — sending a staff member to sailing school, for example, so he could help create a detailed naval fight scene in Assassin’s Creed — but it does not put art ahead of money. It keeps costs down and hedges its bets. (There are nine installments in the less-costly-to-make Just Dance series.) For the first nine months of its current fiscal year, through Dec. 31, 2012, sales totaled 1.1 billion euros, or about $1.4 billion, up 20 percent from 900 million euros in the comparable year-earlier period.

Still, the lucrative business of making video games, which for major game makers like Ubisoft remains largely dependent on repeat success of blockbuster sequels, is now being challenged by the rising popularity of mobile technology like smartphones and tablets. Another Montreal studio, THQ, recently filed for bankruptcy, as did Atari, for years an industry leader.

“It’s a vulnerable industry,” says Nate Wooley, publisher of the Web site Game Industry News.

And the best way to stay strong, suggests Yannis Mallat, chief executive of Ubisoft’s Montreal studio, is to keep pushing the excitement of the experience. “A few years ago,” he says, “there was room in the marketplace for average games. Now, players are more demanding, and rightfully so.”

The games are tested in-house at every stage, with producers hoping their work produces “goose bumps,” says Luc Duchaine, a former game producer there who is now Ubisoft’s Montreal director of communications.

The company is particularly known for its extensive use of performance capture, in which a director works with hired actors. The actors’ gestures and facial expressions, translated into animation, make the characters more emotionally resonant, as in the case of Vaas Montenegro, the Far Cry 3 villain played by the actor Michael Mando.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that Ubisoft was founded. It was 1986, not 1996.