“The scanner became my souvenir vacuum”: Armand Croisonnier on his squishy scanography archive

Paris-based multidisciplinary artist Armand Croisonnier seeks to preserve the people in his life through scanography – a photographic technique involving a flatbed scanner, with roots tracing back to the 1960s and the beginning of Xerox art. Armand was drawn to the scanner because of its unilateral treatment of its subjects in the confines of the machine’s “cold and squishy” aesthetic, leading to a weird and wonderful world of extreme volume and compression.

At the mercy of his scanner, Armand’s subjects go through a process of pure distortion – they are ballooned, flattened and reconfigured into a final uncanny form. The scanner’s glass slices subjects into fragments, which Armand rearranges and reassembles like a game of exquisite corpse. While this process sounds painful, there is always a touch of humour and absurdity that softens Armand’s work. The resulting images feel simultaneously grotesque and affectionate, never losing their sense of play. In this spirit, Armand considers himself a “puppeteer” in a doll’s house – an image likely inspired by his love of Tim Burton films like Mars Attacks! and The Corpse Bride, which he watched almost every day when he was a child.

After countless attempts at flattening the world into scanned imagery, Armand became interested in reversing the process, to “emancipate” subjects from their flatness through volume. In his sculptural works, he experiments with 3D printing in order to feel the hyper-realistic textures of his distortions. For Armand, scanography is a process of documenting, archiving and attempting to bring permanence to an ephemeral world – “because by flattening my world, its objects and my relations, it helped me discover and rediscover my friends and my life to such an extent that I cannot imagine living without it anymore,” says Armand. Born from the experience of loss and the subsequent need to preserve memories, to Armand the scanner is an “archive machine” that reconciles his attachment to the fleeting physical world – to people, objects and moments in time like “Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back getting imprisoned alive in his giant slab of metal,” says Armand. “I try to keep my sense of humour as much as possible to make joyful, absurd portraits. I like to make people laugh and I especially like when fashion laughs at itself.”