Charles Sandison

I've been using computers since I was a child, almost as long as I've been painting. Computers are part of my daily life on many levels -- I use them for work, for pleasure, to communicate... The list is endless and growing all the time. And while there's nothing particularly special about this 'very 21st century' addiction, as an artist I'm challenged by the contrast between my seduction/dependence on computer technology and my ability to look at it from a subjective point of view.

There is of course much to criticise in these technologies, but given their growing importance, they cannot simply be ignored either. I have gradually developed a relationship with computing based on the idea that, at its heart, we find not computers but the 'technological' attitude of human beings. The subject of my work extends to the whole field of technology -- for me, writing and language are technologies in the same way as a word-processing machine is one. The manipulation of nature (for example in agriculture) is a technology based on knowledge and time.

Over the last ten years, I have sought to develop a kind of 'psychology of the phantasm'. I try to use computers to create a mental and physical space that serves as a psychoanalytic experience for the viewer. I use them in such a way that they produce effects endemic to their systems (the result often being linked to the capacity of computers to process complex calculations in real time). These are the same calculations as a painter moving his brush across the canvas, except that the computer allows the artist and the viewer to follow a development over time. This is similar to what a person experiences during a play or when reading a book.

At Le Fresnoy, my intention is to create a work that is totally linked to the site and its space. I'd like to create a computer-based system integrated into a public context. This could be at a local, national or even global level. I've had a passion for landscape, architecture and data projection for some time. The ideas behind this project are almost impossible to achieve:

Flying in a hot-air balloon over a city or desert to project lines of text onto the ground, with the path of the projection following the movements of the balloon.

• Choose three national or international locations (monuments, landscapes or even rivers) to project data at the same time, travelling by radio from one place to another. This could also be done on a local or even personal scale.

• Create a space of total immersion in which the spectator is at the centre of an accelerated universe made up of text or elementary code. Here too, the location would be variable...