2nd ENCATC Capacity Building Days and Youth in Action Day

Since the beginning of the 1990s Pavel Smetana has been artistically experimenting in the field of digital interactive media, creating many installations involving art and neuroscience research as “The Room of Desires”, “The Mirror”, “ The Cyber-Portrait of Dorian Gray”, “Lilith” or “Verticalizator”. Since 2003 he directed several multimedia performances, interconnecting science, contemporary dance and game technologies. Pavel was teaching during eight years (1998-2006) as a Professor of VR and Interactive media in Art at the Art Institute in Aix-en-Provence in France (Ecole d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence) and Director of the International Festival ENTERmultimediale or ENTER (2000 - 2015 ) in Prague, Czech republic. In 2007 and in 2012 Pavel Smetana served as a co-chair of the MutaMorphosis: Challenging Arts and Sciences international conference in Prague.

Since 1998 he is founder/director of CIANT (International Centre for Art and New Technologies - http://ciant.cz) and director of T.S.R.ACT ltd (TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE RESEARCH IN ART AND CULTURE - http://tsract.com/) .

Pavel Smetana was born in Ústí nad Labem, Bohemia. From 1979-1982 he studied at the Arts and Crafts School in the Prague Žižkov neighborhood. He was not accepted to the Academy of Arts in Prague because of political reasons, which was one of the causes why he decided to leave communist Czechoslovakia for France in 1984. In Paris he studied at the École Nationale Superieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD : 1984- 1989) . At first he was engaged in abstract painting, creating oil paintings but also images using tar and asphalt. Another image cycle was made by rubbing canal covers on canvas. I.ex. he exhibited his works at a one-man show in the Saint-Germain Des Prés gallery in Paris. Pavel Smetana’s artwork has been from its beginning aimed towards monumental creations: he is author of various large-format wall-paintings in public space (for example, the 2000 m2 painting in Paris Saint-Lazare metro-train station in 1987 or painting on the Concorde, the first supersonic passenger aircraft, in 1989). He has also created many mobile sculptures or stage design for ballet performances. Since 1988 he had begun to deal with Video and Computer creation in early at ENSAD Lab.