25 years and my life is still/Tryin' to get up that great big hill of hope…And I, I am feeling a little peculiar … And I scream from the top of my lungs, "What's going on?"
What's Up, 4 Non Blondes, 1993
Je est un autre (Arthur Rimbaud: ”I is an other”) is NEMO’s theme this year: a broad reflection on the power of digital technologies to shape web users into avatars, creating autonomous, alternative ”digital personalities” and, as Lana Del Ray sings, “blurring the real and the fake”. NEMO is the Paris regional digital creation show, which opened 1 October at the Centquatre Paris arts center.
What struck me most strongly in this first part of this season-long and region-wide program of exhibitions, performance and activities, is an emphasis on the under-discussed, under-regulated manipulative propensities of the technology and systems that underpin the web, its doings and its dones. But after all, unless you count non-fungible tokens – deliberated rarity – as art, there really is no such thing as ”digital art”. So, if it’s not for art’s sake what’s all this digital fascination, beauty and amusement in favor of?
It’s the acknowledgement of the question that makes NEMO worth seeing.
The curators know that digital technologies are mediums, the 21st Century equivalents of paint, paintbrushes, chisels and stone, not artistic content. As to the messages of these mediums, it’s most often very sophisticated, rather unscrupulous and, often, sinister sales and marketing bushwa sold in depouillé-design, small, shiny machines, metal cigarette packs.
When there is some genuine artistic content of digital-contained technology, it is some rigid arrangement of a or some algorithm(s) of visuals and/or sounds and plane geometries around infinite lines, trompe l’oeil boxes and cylinders) of previously recorded creation or the mediated projection of organics (humans doing monkeyshines). This is then spit into the eye in the form of fun-house style figures or multiple simulacra. The simulacra is inevitably worked up to enhance its attractive or manipulative effect on the human psyche. Usually both.
Marco Brambilla’s huge, gorgeous Heaven’s Gate, for instance, is framed “to make reference to the Great Works of the Renaissance” and creates a ”life fresco” by repetitively serializing a cascade of previously-iconized Hollywood images (King Kong, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, etc., etc.). It’s art, surely, and I admit I stood there in front of it like a cat in the posture of ineffable longing, but I can’t say its digital art. It’s to note to that I walk away from Brambilla’s piece with a refreshed consciousness of brands and services and objects still under copyright.
On the other hand, it is less clear to me that Collectif Universal Everything’s Future You black box piece, which transforms then articulates then projects detected movement into line-and-ovoid figures, is art, digital or otherwise. Sure it’s an interesting artisanal object that can do interesting things, but, really, its content isn’t in the medium but in the talk-talk and palaver around its possibilities.
And, in terms of medium, message and content, the Brambilla and Universal Everything pieces are pretty much par for the course for “digital art”, the content or message is not wholly in the medium – those Hollywood images come from Hollywood, after all – it’s mostly along-side it: And mostly the discourse can be summed up as an Ivana-Trump-equivalent simulacrum personalized to sell you on it.
As a physical experience, art done with digital technology gives the spectator a feeling without providing a physical referent for it. Maxime Houot’s Ataraxie fascinating laser-spurting cylinder is a good example. The scenic frame is pure space-movie, it makes you dizzy with psycho-perceptive trickery; I find myself grabbing on to Karine, solid as a rock, as usual, standing next to me.
And, whether we’re talking about art or not, the angle of entry into the digital space is mostly visual, although sound can be also.
Art and every other intentional content in the digital space manipulates certain flicker and, sometimes, vibration according to the rules of our perceptive faculties to enable experience.
But this doesn’t mean the non-manifested flicker and vibration disappear. They don't.
As strobe-sensitive people, folks with epilepsy and virtually anybody who is psychically borderline will tell you, in the digital space that flicker and vibration affect the brain in the same way that second-hand cigarette smoke affects the lungs. That’s why a day on the computer so wears a body out!
Nobody actually knows the effects of flicker exposure are.
There’s no doubt in my mind that, in combination with a cultural predisposition to paranoia and sales and marketing oriented algorithms, flicker, in particular, makes digital space a priori poison space.
And let’s note that, despite the huge role of flicker (and electronic wave and vibration) in human perception, studies are rather few and limited in scope. And this although since Western Antiquity, at least, people know about light and stillness on wellbeing.
Anyhow, a stroll through NEMO’s CentQuatre offer is a mind-teasing pleasure.
Curators have mobilized nearly 50 highly-skilled, thoughtful individuals and collectives to design, build and perform a whole range of installations, scenarios and choreographies from across Europe and North America.
Featured creators and creative enterprises include:
Donatien Aubert, Tatsuru Arai, Charles Ayats & Vincent Dupont, Marco Brambilla, Hasley Burgund & Francesca Panetta, France Cadet, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Evian Christ, Chen Chu-Yin & Daphné Le Sergent Collectif Impatience, Robbie Cooper, Jean-Luc Cornec, Dos à deux, Encor Studio, Mathieu Gafsou, Cristina Galán, Frederik Heyman, Maxime Houot, Montaine Jean, Stéphane Kozik, Joris Lacoste & Hyoid, Fabien Léaustic, Aloïs Leclet Tryphème & Ulysse Lefort, Julien Loutelier & Axel Rigaud, Ariane Loze, Adrien M & Claire B, Émilie Anna Maillet, Wayne McGregor, Meuko! Meuko!, NeoConsortium, Obvious, Clare Poolman, Christian Rizzo, Jeanne Rocher, Ian Spriggs, TS/CN (Valentin Fayaud & Nicolas Michel), Universal Everything, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, La Vaste Entreprise, Franck Vigroux & Antoine Schmitt, Tatiana Vilela, Dos Santos, Bill Vorn, Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, Etta Marthe Wunsch, Xenoangel and Zone critique
Click here for the list of installations and other programming.
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