Marie-France Bojanowski is my name and I am a creative professional from Montreal based in Zurich since 2006. With a 20+ year professional background at the crossroads of art, design, filmmaking and information technology, I privilege a transdisciplinary creative process where ideas can be challenged from different human, social, cultural and scientific perspectives. Standing at the crossroads of things challenges me to question where I come from and where I’m going.
I deeply believe that creativity is at the base of what’s “being human” and that belief in our creative capacity lies at the heart of innovation. While everyone is born creative, many grow up thinking their creativity has vanished, though it’s only asleep. My experience in life, in art and in science showed me that one key to transdisciplinary success is to enhance what we have in common, rather than our differences: we share the same physical world and we are creative beings. Methods, tools and environments that unleash our creative potential can act as a real catalyzer to blur the boundary between art, science and technology. Grounded in the physical world and connected to others through the prism of creativity, I aim to build the digital world in a novel, ethical, sustainable and viable way.
Out-of-the-Box thinker, passionate maker, good leader and trilingual (E/F/D), I am socially and culturally engaged, thirsty for questions and challenges. Currently at AdNovum Informatik, I design interactions and user experiences in the context of software engineering and contribute to innovation strategies. At YouPers digital health, I designed web and mobile interfaces for behavior-change services for health promotion. In 2011 I was awarded by the Swiss Artists-in-Labs program to work with scientists at the Native Systems Lab, Computer Science Institute at ETH Zurich, where I developed an immersive panoramic experience with photography and brain-interaction using EEG sensors. This led me to ideate a tangible media for haptic neurofeedback, a research project that was granted funding from the Hasler Foundation to develop a prototype with ETH engineers. I am currently pursuing this research on haptic interaction with an object aiming at enhancing our connection to the present moment.
I am a founder and artistic director of Montreal-based collective Farine Orpheline (1996-2006) with who I conducted various time-based storytelling projects internationally in city neighbourhoods, derelict factories, museums, psychiatric hospital and boat. These include soundwalks, performed installations, exhibitions and media devices. I started making films in 1993 while traveling alone around the world for the competition “La Course Destination Monde” aired on Radio-Canada television. There I won 2nd place and 3 awards and since then, I created >100 short and medium documentary films for North-American and European channels, as well as media installations for scenic purposes. Experienced to build projects from the very first sketch, through all its implementation phases until the public dissemination, I constantly renew my conceptual and pragmatic perspective by staying engaged with nature and state-of-the art culture and technology.
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen