(Applause)
Remember how you were at five.
I've got news for you, at five I was blonde.
I was blonde and I loved coloring.
I used to color all the time, often and everywhere.
Remember how we would sit on the floor colouring,
or sitting around a table,
among friends to colour.
Remember the colouring book we had.
How many time did we look it? 800 times?
Turning page after page looking for the drawing
we wanted to make that day.
And when we had fount it, we used to tear off the sheet --
everybody would do that -- and we started colouring.
And here is the magic.
We began to chat all together
on five years old only matters.
For example, the prince charming.
Or maybe the neighbour's cat.
Questions were being raised. Questions like
"Do goldfishes sleep with their eyes open or closed."
Existential questions were also being raised,
because at five we ask ourselves existential questions.
We asked ourselves: "Has the Dalai Lama
any outfit other than orange and yellow in his wardobe."
Actually around the table, around the colouring book,
a lot of thing happened.
We talked, but we would also discuss one important thing,
we would discuss about what we were doing around the table.
We would wow on the drawing of one of our friend
because she wouldn't go over the lines.
Wow! And we would wow or we would boo on other's drawings
because we had never seen that:
Cinderella spitting out slices of bacon.
What was amazing,
was that we were talking about creation at that time
without knowing it yet.
I would paraphrase Joseph Beuys
and I would say that we were definitely all artists.
This colouring book on the kitchen table,
at five, was my social network,
it was my distribution platform,
and my coloured pencils were my artistic medium,
now it's my iPhone.
The camera was Vivian Maier's coloured pencils.
Vivian Maier is a photographer,
che was a nanny, living in Chicago.
She's lived there for about 40 years.
Literally she was a Mary Poppins.
But Vivian Maier was more than that,
she was a street-photographer.
She posed the everyday life between the fifties and the seventies
and what's remarkable about her
is that she never published
any of her pictures.
In 2009, a guy named John Maloof who was writing a history book
said: "I need visual material."
So he goes to an auction sale,
he come across some boxes belonging to Vivian Maier
containing some films.
There were about 5000 pictures inside that box.
He goes "There is certainly something interesting for my history book."
He buys the whole batch and he goes back home,
and he falls flat on his back,
he's looking at the boxes and says:
"I'm probably looking at the greatest street photographer
of our times."
Then he says: "I can't leave all this stuff in the boxes."
He says: "I have to do something about it."
He says: "Am I raving
about the talent of this woman?"
So he uploads the pictures of Flickr
which is a platform with many photographers,
posting their portfolio.
He goes on a discussion forum
about street photography and he asks:
"What do I do with this stuff?"
He posts al link
with about ten Vivian Maier digitized pictures.
It's the first time that photos
of this artist are being published.
Of course, feedbacks are instantaneous.
People saying: "This is historical stuff you have here,
you should absolutely show this stuff to people.
You can't just leave them in the plastic boxes."
He says, "Ok, I've got 5000 photos,
I need funds,
I can't do this by myself."
What does he do? He decides he's going to make a documentary.
He presents his project on Kickstarter platform.
Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform.
Crowdfunding is funding through community.
You present a project, you get it financed,
not necessarily by your left or right neighbour,
rather by the entire planet
helping to fund a project on voluntary basis.
Of course he presents his documentary project
which will tell about Vivian Maier story,
but also about Vivian Maier artistic work
and the extraordinary uncovering of this photographer.
Of course, it's a success,
he gets its funding and thanks to this platform
today we have access to the complete work of this artist,
we have access to a website
and now to a gallery, to museums, books and stuff like that.
And what's amazing is that Vivian Maier
didn't have access in the senventies to these distribution platforms.
She had just her coloured pencils,
she didn't have any colouring book.
John Maloof opened up Vivian Maier's colouring book.
And I'm sure that today, Vivian Maier
would probably use the same tools I use,
because it fits her artistic practice
and it fits the job she was doing at that time.
I can imagine her with her iPhone:
"Yes ma'am, Simon and myself had a wonderful day,
except for the dinosaure he put into his nose, everything is fine.
I succeeded in taking it off and I took 12 wonderful pictures
and I uploaded them on instagram with the hashtag #dinosaureinnose."
I'm sure she would have done that today
because it fits with the artistic practice.
And these platforms
are even closer to Joseph Beuys ideal
when he says, "Everyone is an artist"
we get even closer to it.
And like I said before Vivian Maier would be today an iPhoneographer,
but you could ask me what is iPhoneography?
iPhoneography is the art of taking pictures
with your iPhone and editing these pictures with your iPhone.
If you take your pictures out of your iPhone it's not iPhoneography anymore.
If you have an Android it's called mobile photography.
And all this stuff, all these tools
go under a new artistic movement called mobile art.
Mobile art
also need these distribution platforms.
Because people, on these distribution platforms,
that otherwise wouldn't have got their work
out of the plastic boxes, like Vivian Maier
people we wouldn't have otherwise heard about.
People that possibly
wouldn't have open their colouring book
without these distribution platforms and without these accessible tools.
People that without the platforms
and without ecouragement coming from communities already operating on those platforms
wouldn't otherwise have shown publicly their work.
Unlike 10 years ago we are now all curators
of what we have on the web.
We decide about the content, it's participative.
10 years ago someone else would have decided for us
what the aesthetic ideal we had to watch was.
They would have decided the pictures we had to see.
Today you participate.
You decide what you watch, you participate.
You put it there, you just decide what you see.
10 years ago you took a picture,
you developed your photos and that's all.
Today it's completely different.
You take a picture, you ask yourself,
you crop it, you filter it,
you adjust brightness, you adjust colours
and then you publish it and you talk about it.
You're doing art taking pictures
thanks to these tools, to the smartphone that you always carry.
It's wonderful and I love making things up --
I'm certainly making things up, but it's partially true --
hopefully 25 millions of users
registered on Instagram today,
because this is the last figures we have, we are 25 millions on Instagram,
le'ts say half of them, let's say 12,5 millions of Instagram users,
using this today, take a photo,
apply a filter and share the photo;
it's 12.5 million people making an artistic act
they wouldn't have done ten years ago.
Ten years ago, these 12.5 million people
didn't make any creative activity.
Today, we do; it's amazing.
I really think that we're having a huge art therapy.
And it could be good.
It was for me in 2009
the year John Maloof discovered Vivan Maier,
I discovered iPhoneography.
The year John Maloof discovered Vivian Maier
I discovered iPhoneography
and if I hadn't access to this --
I discovered iPhoneography and I said wow --
it really knows who I am
my temper, my love for technology.
But in 2009, I was so closed,
I was creating
but without sharing what I was doing.
And then it made want to do it.
I felt I wanted to try out a testing.
I put my first experiment on Flickr platform
and bang, I had some feedback.
And these feedbacks made me want to go on.
They made me want to try out, further experiments, a lot of experiments.
What happened after that
is that my pictures went all over the world.
They went to Miami, Melbourne,
Berlin, London, Madrid.
Some of them have been to Sidney, to Barcelona,
I even found them in Montréal.
It's amazing because iPhoneography
enabled me to open my colouring book,
and feeling, with these platforms,
like I was five around the kitchen table
or around a table drawing with my friends,
like I was five and I was told:
wow, what a cinderella spitting bacon slices
but colours are not better.
I was feeling like that.
I think mobile art will have the same cultural impact --
this is really big --
mobile art will have the same cultural impact
as the invention of paint tube.
In the 19th century the oil paint tube.
In the 19h century artists painted in their studio
because they couldn't get out
because they had to mix the colours.
And it was really big, they really couldn't get out.
And somebody came up saying: "Hey dude, we put this stuff in tubes."
And what happened?
The artists got out painting outside.
And what happens?
Impressionism came out of this invention.
And I'd say mobile art was born
from technolgical tools invented recently:
smartphones.
It's like impressionists,
I have my studio in my pocket.
I can create everywhere,
I can create, edit, change colours,
I can do this stuff at whatever timezone.
But unlike impressionists,
and unlike Vivian Maier
what is amazing is I can also share my pictures,
wherever I am.
I can share and talk about them.
Imagine,
today we are 12 milions more, 25 milions, it doesn't matter,
creating everyday, thing we wouldn't do before,
How many of you take pictures,
it's a trend, thing that you were not used to do 10 years ago.
If you think that we are 12 milions more people
creating daily
this could be just good for humankind.
Why? Because artists are open people.
If in these 13 milions a siginificative part
are even more open, it's better for us all, right?
What's exceptionnal
is that in 2009 when I found out about iPhoneography
I've opened again my colouring book
and I found out that in this book
I had a lot of unfinished drawings.
I had a lot of drawings.
Since then I haven't closed the book yet
of course because I notice them every day.
Thanks to these tools and thanks to these platforms
I notice every day around me
I have friends, people I know
who start creating, thing that they wouldn't have done before.
We've just won, every day we win a bit of an artist
in everyone.
Imagine me doing that,
imagine around me people doing that,
we may expect 12 millions people
doing the same thing
and imagine the impact this could have,
because for me, on me, it had an impact.
One day in 2009 someone partcipating on a platform,
responded to a picture I had put.
And I am what I am today, I gave him back what I am.
It's amazing, I invite you in participating to this great plesure.
Thank you.
(Applause)