Maurice Benayoun

Maurice Benayoun (born 29 March 1957), also known as MoBen, is a French new media artist, curator and theorist who has made virtual reality artworks since 1994. His VR works of the 1990s include Dieu est-il plat? (Is God Flat?, 1994), Le Diable est-il courbe? (Is the Devil Curved?, 1995) and Le Tunnel sous l'Atlantique (The Tunnel under the Atlantic, 1995), a networked VR event that linked the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris with the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. World Skin, a Photo Safari in the Land of War, a CAVE installation he made with composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière, won the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at the 1998 Prix Ars Electronica.

Benayoun taught at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne from 1984, later at Université Paris 8, and from 2012 at the School of Creative Media of City University of Hong Kong, where he directed the Neuro-Design Lab. His later work moved into urban media facades, brain-computer interaction and blockchain-based art. In 2025 the ACM Creativity and Cognition conference described him as Head of the Art and Architecture Intelligence Lab and Chair Professor at Nanjing University's Schools of Art and Architecture.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Checked birth, education, career posts, Z-A, Quarxs, VR works, Tunnel under the Atlantic hardware and credits, World Skin credits, 1998 Golden Nica and jury quotes, and later work against the 1995 Centre Pompidou press kit, Ars Electronica and SIGGRAPH archives, ISEA archives, CityU lab page, ACM C&C 2025, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, e-flux and the artist's own biography. About review dates.

Early life and education

Benayoun's own biography gives his birthplace as Mascara, Algeria, and states that he moved to France in 1958. The Centre Pompidou's 1995 press kit gives his date of birth as 29 March 1957 and describes him as holding the agrégation in plastic arts. According to his biography, he received the agrégation in 1982 and graduated in fine arts from Panthéon-Sorbonne University in the early 1980s. In 2008 he submitted his blog The Dump, a collection of unrealized art projects, as a doctoral thesis at Université Paris 1 under the title "Artistic Intentions at Work: Hypothesis for Committing Art".

Career

Video and computer animation

Benayoun began with short videos about contemporary artists. The 1995 Pompidou press kit lists films he made between 1984 and 1988 on works by Daniel Buren, Jean Tinguely, Bertrand Lavier, Takis, Martial Raysse and Sol LeWitt, among others. In the late 1980s he co-founded Z-A Production (Z.A Production), a company producing television, film and advertising work with 3D computer graphics; the press kit dates his involvement in its creation to 1988, while his own biography and his Ars Electronica biography give 1987 and describe Z-A as a computer graphics and virtual reality laboratory.

At Z-A he directed Les Quarxs, a computer-animated series he co-wrote with Belgian comic artist François Schuiten between 1990 and 1993. The Pompidou press kit describes it as the first high-definition 3D series also produced on 35 mm film; the pilot dates from 1991, a 12-episode run of three-minute episodes from 1993, and a 35 mm film of 21 minutes 30 seconds, Ils sont là!, from 1994. He also art-directed 3D effects for the feature films Mécaniques célestes (Fina Torres) and Le monde est un grand Chelem, and the title sequence Mirage illimité, co-directed with Alain Escalle, won first prize in the title-sequence category at Imagina 93.

Virtual reality works

In 1993 Benayoun received a Villa Médicis Hors les Murs grant from the French Foreign Ministry for Art After Museum (A.M.E.), a contemporary art collection in virtual reality that he developed with other artists.

The first of his VR installations, Dieu est-il plat?, was presented at the exhibition Artifices 3 in Saint-Denis in November 1994 and in 1995 at Milia in Cannes and the international contemporary art fair in Strasbourg. The press kit describes it as a playful search for God through representations of God. Le Diable est-il courbe?, about the figures of seduction, followed at Imagina in Monte Carlo in February 1995. Both were developed with Z-A, which said the projects had led it to build interactive systems that took visitor behavior into account, so that the content changed according to the visitor's choices without the visitor directly deciding the result.

The Tunnel under the Atlantic

Le Tunnel sous l'Atlantique ran from 20 to 24 September 1995 in the Grand Foyer of the Centre Georges Pompidou and at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, during the ISEA 95 symposium in Montreal. Participants on each side of the Atlantic "dug" through a virtual tunnel toward each other. Instead of geological layers they cut through strata of images (photographs, engravings, film stills and news pictures) about the history of relations between France and Canada. Each explorer was guided by sound: Argentine composer Martin Matalon wrote an interactive score at IRCAM whose parameters followed the explorer's speed and direction, and the balance of the music only resolved when the two participants met, at which point their images met and floated in the shared space.

Each site used a Silicon Graphics Onyx RealityEngine2 with four CPUs and an SGI Indy running Z-A's own Gadeva, Tunnel and Gadecam software, an IRCAM music workstation, a Power Macintosh running Max, four speakers for spatialized sound using the Spatialisateur software developed by IRCAM and Espaces Nouveaux, two video projectors and a Canon color printer. David Nahon and Tristan Lorach developed the software, and Z-A Production and the French Ministry of Culture produced the work. In the ISEA2016 archive entry for the work, Benayoun described the work's virtual agents (a librarian, an architect, a video director, a photo reporter and a composer) and called it the first intercontinental virtual reality installation and the first real-time video meeting inside a VR environment. Writing in Hyperallergic in 2016, Ellen Pearlman called it "the first VR installation to cross continents". A later tunnel work from 1997 linked Paris and New Delhi; its video documentation is titled Inside the Paris-New Delhi Tunnel.

World Skin

World Skin, a Photo Safari in the Land of War (1997) is a CAVE installation, listed by the SIGGRAPH art archive as 10 by 10 by 10 feet. Visitors carry cameras through a 3D landscape assembled from images of different war zones; each picture they take erases that fragment of the scene, leaving a black silhouette, and the photographs are printed. Barrière (credited with IRCAM) wrote the interactive music; Patrick Bouchaud, Kimi Bishop and David Nahon (credited with S.G.I. Europe and Z.A Production) wrote the software; and the work was produced by Z-A Production, the Ars Electronica Center and Silicon Graphics Europe.

The work won the Golden Nica in the Interactive Art category of the Prix Ars Electronica in 1998, a year in which the Interactive Art jury included Michael Naimark and journalist John Markoff. In the jury statement Markoff wrote that the piece "offered a startling tour of a modern battlefield from the perspective of a photojournalist" and noted that it was "one of three CAVE-based entries in this year's contest". A Rhizome report from that year's festival described it as a VR landscape of war images referencing the war in Yugoslavia, made of static, rotoscoped cut-outs from photographs, and wrote that the artists offered "more of a meditation on history than a replacement" of the battlefield. World Skin was shown at the SIGGRAPH 98 Touchware exhibition and at ISEA2000 in Paris.

His biography also lists Crossing Talks, Communication Rafting (1999) as a virtual reality and Internet installation. Ars Electronica's biography lists him as a guest artist at ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Ars Electronica Center, ICC in Tokyo and Art Center Nabi in Seoul, and notes his interactive exhibition work The Navigation Room (1997) and The Membrane (2001) for the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris and the Panoramic Tables for the Planet of Visions pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover. His own biography describes the Panoramic Tables as an application of augmented reality.

Academic posts

Benayoun taught video and new imaging at Université Paris 1 from 1984, where he took part in research on special effects and new technologies in audiovisual production. His biography gives his Paris 1 tenure as 1984 to 2010, with a period as invited artist and professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts from 1995 to 1997. He co-founded the CITU research center (Création Interactive Transdisciplinaire Universitaire). In 2010 he became an associate professor at Université Paris 8, where he founded the H2H Lab in 2011.

According to his biography, he became a full professor at the School of Creative Media of City University of Hong Kong in August 2012 and chaired its graduate studies and PhD program from 2014 to 2018. He directed the school's Neuro-Design Lab, co-directed by Tobias Klein, whose research areas included EEG-based brain-computer interaction, generative adversarial networks, VR and AR, artificial life and blockchain art. His biography states that he moved to Nanjing in 2024 as a Distinguished Professor and Head of the Art and Architecture Intelligence Lab.

Later work

In 2014 he launched the Open Sky Project, inviting artists and students to make works for the media facade of Hong Kong's International Commerce Centre. The Neuro-Design Lab describes The Brain Factory as giving shape to human abstractions through brain-computer interaction, with thoughts converted into objects by 3D printing, and Value of Values as connecting those shapes to a blockchain for transactions and collection. His biography lists a Brain Factory prototype combining EEG, VR and 3D printing at Art Center Nabi in Seoul in 2016. The lab's DïaloG is an urban installation by Benayoun and Refik Anadol. DïaloG was presented at ISEA2022 in Barcelona.

In 2016 the Osage gallery in Hong Kong revisited his VR tunnels in the exhibition JUST DIG/IT! (20 April to 25 May 2016), which showed the videos Inside the Tunnel under the Atlantic and Inside the Paris-New Delhi Tunnel together with two new motion-sensing works, Colors Tunnel and Borders Tunnel. The ISEA symposium archive lists these works as presented at the Osage gallery within ISEA2016.

Recognition

Year	Recognition	Work
1993	First prize, title sequences category, Imagina 93	Mirage illimité (with Alain Escalle)
1993	Villa Médicis Hors les Murs grant	Art After Museum (A.M.E.)
1998	Golden Nica, Interactive Art, Prix Ars Electronica	World Skin (with Jean-Baptiste Barrière)
2000	Chevalier of Arts and Letters, French Ministry of Culture (per his biography)	General recognition