I am a physicist, engineer and multimedia artist. I am a staff scientist and visiting artist at the University of Chicago (Jaeger Lab), and founding artistic director of Shapes of Emergence. I am interested in how patterns self-organize in nature, as a scientific topic, and as a creative medium at the cross of art and technology. In my performance work, I explore a process that highlights a connection in the emergence of natural and artificial forms. I develop audio-visual immersive narratives, with real-time projections of physics experiments, as well as robotic installations. In my scientific research, I develop new forms of embodied artificial intelligence based on self-organizing properties, blurring the distinction between materials, programmable assemblies, and autonomous robots. I earned a PhD in physics from Sorbonne University in Paris, France, and did post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University. I was awarded a CAMIT grant from the council for the art at MIT in 2018 and had residencies at MANA Contemporary’s High Concept Labs in Chicago (Feb. 2019 to Dec. 2020), at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Jan - Dec 2019), and I am currently part of the 2024 resident laureates cohort at Chateau Ephemere in France (2023-2024). I was an artist laureate at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) 2023. My art and scientific works have been presented in international events such as the 5th Chicago Architecture Biennial, the American Geophysical Union meeting, the American Physical Society’s March Meeting, ISEA 2023, and the Festival Zero 1. My research has been published in international journals including Science Robotics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and Physical Review letters.

More information about Baudouin’s work here.