Parse/Error

Artist

Parse/Error · parseerror.net/portfolio/mind-maze ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/parseerror ↗

Based

Lives and works in Marseille, France

Practice

Generative art, immersive installations, interactive experiences, connected objects, electronics, light, and real-time data

In the set

Mind Maze ↗ · 333 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Parse/Error is the working name of Fabien Bouchard, a French, self-taught artist whose scientific and information-technology background informs a practice spanning software, electronics, light, virtual space, and physical installation. A 2025 institutional guide from Galerie de Rohan locates him in Marseille and describes his work as an encounter among art, design, and technology, focused particularly on relations between humanity and nature under digital conditions.¹ That breadth matters: code is not simply his production tool, but a means of translating forces that are otherwise abstract, remote, or invisible into experiences that can be sensed.

His connected objects established this approach before Mind Maze. Earthquake Lamp converts worldwide seismic information into pulses of light and low sound, with variations corresponding to an earthquake’s location and magnitude.² Instability of Nature similarly uses a Geiger-Müller counter to register beta and gamma radiation, generating a luminous ripple for each detected particle.³ These works give volatile environmental processes domestic or sculptural form. Their polished surfaces invite contemplation, while their live inputs disturb any impression of stability.

The labyrinth as worldview

Released through Art Blocks Factory on April 25, 2022, Mind Maze comprises exactly 333 editions.⁴ The project presents an endlessly changing labyrinth observed from above, accompanied by a continuously scrolling cryptic message. Its stated concerns include the relationship between mindset and worldview, the contemporary pressures placed on communication and mental health, and the barriers produced by language and cultural construction.⁵

The maze is therefore less a puzzle awaiting solution than a perceptual condition. Elevated viewpoints make the structures appear legible, yet motion prevents complete mastery. Borders resemble streets, writing, circuits, or fortified enclosures, while color and animation keep those associations unstable. The scrolling message intensifies this productive uncertainty: language appears as visual evidence of communication, but not necessarily as transparent meaning. The viewer occupies the position of a reader who can see the system without fully resolving it.

This tension links Mind Maze to Parse/Error’s wider attention to collective motion. His public work Data Storm draws on bird murmurations, schools of fish, network cables, and changing data feeds to form a visual whirlwind whose behavior can respond to weather, pollution, online activity, cryptocurrency values, nearby Wi-Fi networks, and other inputs.⁶ In both projects, many discrete elements cohere into a larger field. The resulting order remains provisional, shaped by autonomous movement, information flow, and the observer’s search for pattern.

Live on Art Blocks: mind-maze-by-parseerror ↗

From screen to situated experience

Parse/Error’s practice repeatedly tests how computational images change when they become environments. In 2023, Excursio combined an immersive room with an interactive installation that joined physical and virtual boundaries.⁷ At REXPERIENCE in Kuala Lumpur, Between Worlds was projected across the floor, where its moving geometric forms prompted comparisons to fish, birds, and windblown grass.⁸ For Alienarium, developed for Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s 2022 Serpentine project, Bouchard contributed graphic development to a multi-user virtual-reality environment concerned with human, nonhuman, and extraterrestrial encounters.⁹

These contexts clarify the spatial imagination within Mind Maze. Even when encountered on a screen, the work proposes navigation rather than a fixed composition. Its overhead perspective, animated depth, and recurring boundaries imply a place that extends beyond the frame. The project condenses the artist’s installation logic into an on-chain generative system: each output is distinct, yet all belong to the same mutable architecture.

A later institutional presentation confirms the continuity of these questions. Galerie de Rohan’s 2025 exhibition Présence brought together four interactive works addressing nature, technology, and humanity, including invisible forces such as ambient radioactivity and pollution.¹⁰ Across these projects, Parse/Error treats technology neither as spectacle alone nor as a neutral instrument. It is a cultural environment that filters perception. Mind Maze makes that environment visible as a field of paths, limits, signals, and unanswered choices.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Parse/Error links page ↗.