Pierre Braun

Pierre Braun, born in 1961 in Paris, is a French visual artist, researcher, and lecturer. Since 1994, he has taught at the University of Rennes 2, where he established programs in digital and multimedia practices within the art department and later developed master’s programs in art and design. He earned a DEA in Arts and Sciences of Art under François Molnár, a former painter who became a researcher and director of the Centre de Recherche Expérimentale des Arts Visuels (CREAV) at the University of Paris 1. In 1985, Braun co-founded the Centre de Recherche Expérimentale et Informatique des Arts Visuels (CREIAV), a pioneering associative platform dedicated to exploring artistic systems shaped by computation and the introduction of digital technologies into academic art research. He holds a doctorate in Arts and Sciences of Art and serves as scientific director of the publishing house Présent Composé, which focuses on scholarly publications by artists and art historians on the transition to the digital era in the arts. Since the early 1980s, Braun has explored the connections between code, drawing, and visual perception through minimal and generative compositions. His practice began with Fortran and punch cards at the Paris 1 computing center and at IREM Jussieu, then at Saint-Charles (Paris 1), where he worked with early personal computers such as the Apple II, BFM 186, and IBM PC to study graphic perception and 3D modeling. Between 1984 and 1986, he worked with Vera Molnár on experimental drawing systems, contributing to research in graphic and algorithmic art while sharing with her an independent, critical approach to generative form. His work investigates how digital technologies reshape gesture, reproduction, and the materiality of graphic processes, often revisiting modernist motifs such as grids, modules, and harmonic curves. Projects such as Sinusoïdes and Stitch Up highlight processes of repetition, interruption, and variation, using plotters, dot-matrix printers, and code as both medium and method. His practice extends the sensory experience of code and generative data into other media—including drawing, painting, photography, animation, and digital publishing—guided by an interest in the material and social traces of programmed processes. Braun’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Galerie Lara Vincy and Galerie Data in Paris, including Print Screen, Sinusoïdes, and Recollection. He has also participated in group exhibitions such as Digital Konkret in Bonn and CAAO at the Sorbonne, curated by François Molnár. His publications include Digital Klee, Libérez les machines !, and L’ensauvagement graphique du code, along with edited volumes on Vito Acconci, Hubert Renard, and Vera Molnár, and essays on pioneers of computer art and net art. Through Présent Composé, he has developed a series of hybrid paper-digital editions devoted to artist fictions and notebooks, the aesthetics of reproduction, interactive media, generative systems, and the graphic aesthetics of mechanical drawing.