Superstitions Numériques
"Tout le fantastique est rupture de l'ordre reconnu, irruption de l'inadmissible au sein de l'inaltérable légalité quotidienne." Roger Caillois
Conversasion avec Martine Rousset, cinéaste "cabane".
Comment dirais-tu que tu travailles le rapport entre le son, l'image et le texte ?
En gros, c'est ça. Quand il y a un film avec un texte, c'est qu'il y a une rencontre entre un paysage et un texte. Non pas un paysage qui illustre un texte ou un texte qui va illustrer un paysage, mais un lien de similarité, comme si les racines du texte étaient dans ce paysage, comme si les racines du paysage étaient dans ce texte.
[…]
Le cinéma peut essayer de voir ce que veux dire ce : "C'est là". Quelle est la racine commune ? Est-ce que ce paysage précède le texte, est-ce que ce texte existe parce que ce paysage existe dans le monde ? Comment ça se rencontre, comment passe le texte dans le paysage, comment le paysage passe dans le texte ? C'est fragile, ça, ce n'est pas là pour imposer des certitudes ou des analyses. D'où les parties en noir & blanc dans le film, qui sont comme des images qui sont passées par le texte, revenantes. J'ai juste envie d'aller dans certains lieux avec la caméra, un micro, le sonny pro, filmer avec une certaine lumière et attendre qu'il se passe quelque chose.
Entretien publié dans Jef Klak n°2 "Bout de ficelle" - Association Marabout - Printemps / été 2015.
#Altrer Réel Numériques / Superstitions numériques — Les passages du réel aux numériques
Je m'intéresse aux points de passages entre les objets du réels et l'imaginaire numérique. M'inspirant de la définition du fantastique de Todorov _Indroduction à la littérature fantastique_, ou il (le fantastique) ne peut exister que lors d'une hésitation, autant celle du personnage que du lecteur, se demandant s'il doivent accepter le surnaturel tel qu'il est et l'intégrer au réel ou s'ils doivent le refuser et l'expliquer par leurs lois concrètes.
J'applique alors cette "hésitation" à l'idée que nous tentons au travers du numérique de produire des "équivalents" des objets de notre environnement. Cependant, ces transcriptions ne sont pas des copies conforme des objets qu'ils traduisent, mais une adaptation dépendantes des contraintes du numérique. Ils développent ainsi une autonomie vis-à-vis de l'objet qu'ils tentent de reproduire. Leur nouveau contexte leur procure une identité qui leur est propre.
Néanmoins, ces objets que nous traduisons ont une valeur en eux-même, un affect qui leur est attribué par les sentiments, les émotions que nous éprouvons à leur contacts. Je me demande alors jusqu'à quel points ces émotions se transmettent aux traductions de ces objets. Et si, au vu de leur autonomie, cet affect ne se transforme pas, lui aussi, créant des sentiments "nouveaux".
"L'hésitation" a alors lieu lors de la "transformation" de ces sentiments : dois-je accepter que la traduction numérique est un "nouvel objet" avec une identité et une indépendance propre et donc produit un affect "nouveau", hors des loi des objets "réels", ou alors est-ce un simulacre de l'affect de l'objet "original" qui n'as pas d'existence propre.
Je me place dans une recherche face à ces "reproductions", pour analyser et comprendre comment "l'hésitation" se produit. Et, tout comme la littérature fantastique se sert de cette "hésitation" comme un procédé narratif permettant de raconter une histoire, (les réactions des personnages face à ces événements, les liens qui vont les y lier, etc.), je tente de me servir de cette "hésitation" appliquée au numérique comme un procédé narratif et graphique. Ainsi, voir ce que peut raconter l'hybridation de ces objets, ce qu'elle peut produire et générer, comment elle peut devenir un support et un médium.
Par exemple, l'artiste britannique Ed Atkins, au sein de son oeuvre Ribbons crée une représentation de lui-même mélangeant 3D et captation vidéo en très haute résolution pour produire un avatar catalysant les aliénations que produisent les réseaux sociaux. Se détachant ainsi du besoin de parler des réseaux sociaux pour exprimer les impressions qui en découlent. Il qualifie ainsi la personnalité de cet avatar comme "dépressive, souvent sous une table ou derrière un mur", c’est "une chose horrible dans le besoin". Une allégorique de notre condition face à ces médiums. Il questionne ainsi la relation ambivalente existant entre les objets réels et virtuels et les conditions réelles et virtuelles.
Autrement, dans leur documentaire The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave, Alain Della Negra et Kaori Kinoshita cherchent à comprendre la manière dont les fantasmes de certaines personnes (vie enviées, transformations corporelles, etc.) prennent place dans cet "autre réel" qu'est le numérique et plus particulièrement le jeu "Second Life".
Un autre exemple serait celui de Kari Altmann. Elle s’approprie les manières de communiquer autour de la technologie et réalise des collages numériques et des vidéos qu'elle expose sur son site internet. Ses créations se veulent en perpétuelle évolution et ne sont pas externalisées, à moins que cela lui soit proposé pour une exposition. L’œuvre change alors d’état sans que cela ne transforme la version "numérique" : son travail exposé est toujours visible en ligne, tel quel. Ses expositions ne sont ainsi pas des "retranscriptions" de son travail numérique, mais un autre mode d’existence pour ses réalisations qui sont au fond continuellement exposées.
Holly Herndon
Falling Rope, 2013
"Nobuo Nakamura, Director of CCA Kitakyushu, who chaired this year’s jury, commented that “Mirza presents work enclosing many different elements of art and technology, effortlessly traversing domain boundaries. He skillfully combines sound, installation and moving image, conflating old analogue material such as TV, keyboard, amplifier, furniture, with cutting edge high-tech material, positioning aspects of culture and time and transient technology into one space.” Another jury member, Mike Stubbs, Director of FACT Liverpool, added that “the jury selected Mirza for his ability to consistently extend a practice, which continues a fascination with media, time and transmission, much like Paik, similarly speaking beyond cultures, language and belief. […] Work, which demands the imagination and completion by us, the audience, deserves the prize, for his own openness in revealing a process of experiment in creating and re-mixing his own audio-visual system.”
Computer Dreams (1988)
Computer Dreams
Shana Moulton
"Shana Moulton is one of these artists who I am delighted to have been presented with; her lo-fi semi-autobiographic videos are a total pleasure. She’s the kind of artist I really like, her work gives you something at first glance but then reveals layer after layer of extra depth upon further investigation. Initially they seem like good examples of post-digital/post-internet filmic work, perhaps exploring how constant communication desensitises us. But no! Whispering Pines is much more than your average lo-fi film. Taking influence from subjects as wide ranging as Twin Peaks to old ladies knick-knacks, Moulton’s works are a barrage of self-confidence issues, hypochondria and humour."
FLEXIA
wwwwwwwww.jodi.org
Ed Atkins
"One of the most prominent artists of his generation, Ed Atkins works primarily with High Definition video and text, exploiting and subverting the conventions of moving image and literature.
Centred around an augmented and appended version of the new multi-screen video work Ribbons, Atkins’s exhibition transformed the Serpentine Sackler Gallery into a submersive environment of syncopated sounds, bodies and spaces. This is his largest solo exhibition in a UK public institution to date.
Ribbons (2014) had its UK premiere at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in a site-specific adaptation. Presented alongside installations of text and images, accompanying videos and tourettic interjections, the exhibition underscored the ambivalent relationship that exists between real and virtual objects; between real and virtual conditions.
“The Sackler exhibition will re-possess some sort of sub-horror genre; the old powder rooms, haunted by the phantom smell of gunpowder, paranoia and anticipation of violence, will emphasise a particularly phantasmatic aspect of Ribbons; the protagonist’s questionable corporeality, their presence, their performance of loss and monstrousness” – Ed Atkins
Sounds from a suite of synchronised projections positioned throughout the Gallery led the visitor through the space, with glimpses of song, swells of orchestra, murmuring voices and waves of sub-bass. Ribbons is part musical, part horror, and part melodrama; Bach’s Erbarme Dich and Randy Newman’s I think it’s going to rain today are two of the songs featured. Naked, lonely and misanthropic, the palpable melancholy of Atkins’s Computer Generated avatar hero is ‘rendered’ as HD graphic, troll, voyeur and, perhaps, artist.
Atkins’s work draws attention to the way in which we perceive, communicate and filter information. His videos combine layered images with incomplete or interrupted excerpts of singing, speech, subtitles and handwriting. Working with a specialist in computer generated animation, Atkins exploits the hyperreal surfaces produced by new software systems to create complex, nightmarish environments populated by virtual characters, avatars of ambiguous provenance and desires. Atkins has described the male figure that appears in these works as ‘a character that is literally a model, is demonstrably empty – a surrogate and a vessel’. Despite the emotive music and poetic syntax of the protagonists, their emptiness serves to remind the three-dimensional, warm-bodied viewer of their own physicality.
The experience of the physical body in Atkins’s show was be contrasted with and complemented by the durational performance being undertaken by Marina Abramović, whose exhibition ran concurrently at the Serpentine Gallery. "
Kate Cooper - RIGGED
For Kate Cooper's first institutional exhibition RIGGED, this year's winner of the Schering Stiftung Art Award has produced a new work comprising of video and photographic production specifically for KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART. Through an extensive use of CGI techniques commercial photography and post-production, the show RIGGED highlights the labor inherent in the creation of images, looking at the position the female body has occupied in the history of digital image technology. Through the creation and re-rendering of images of the body, Cooper asks how these digital figures might perform in our place made real as downloadable, ultra-realized bodies. Cooper is interested in the fictional spaces of universally understood advertising images, tests our experience of them and relationship to them and thus openly questions our conceptions of gender and labor they collectively generate. RIGGED explores new possible connections between bodies and images, and presents tensions between presence and invisibility. As digital images become our body doubles – expensive yet unpaid figures performing on our behalf – the labor inherent in these modes of production becomes re-focused in an economy of withdrawal. Our own bodies use a strategy of refusal; and camouflage as a technique of survival. As Cooper states: "In our post-representational world – where images are dislocated and free-floating across networks – how can we renegotiate an agency to images, imbue them with power, make them work for us?" RIGGED displays the human being itself as a commercial good, the billboard-sized figures, installed throughout the space, focus on the body as a place for communicating ideas; re-coding and re-configuring new meanings. As the rendered images become disturbingly realistic, Cooper's doppelgangers surround the observer in their muted formations, and narrate their own illusionary potential, which is more permanent than flesh. Curated by Ellen Blumenstein
Petra Cortright at Société
I had a computer since I was one. Like thousands of trees, water- falls and stuff. It would be so good to look at now, this printed-out list of emoticons. The librarian was telling everyone to use Google instead of Yahoo because it was better. I thought it was a weird word. unnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnghthist question. google images probably?? i wrote in 2007 inspired by the meeting of largest dog in the world with the smallest dog in the world: They have stupid technology. Money doesn’t exist. borderline creepy stuff like that. They got really freaked out because I only showed up with my laptop and a webcam I was listening to happy hardcore and Britney Spears remixes till 6 AM. so it was hard to eat and sleep, but I was massively productive and I made so many videos. It was really exciting, but all of the sudden I felt really sick and I actually threw up I’m like the biggest baby ever. I was on the pre Olympic team. I quit at the height of everything because all of the college scouts were showing up to watch you like Britney Spears, Taco Bell, KFC, Rugrats It’s really silly, it’s really dark, it’s really beautiful At Petco they have this big machine where you can make dog tags. i cant say i am like “philosophically” into it. its convenient. but i have to say though that the comments are a special gift since 08 i become more organized skypes just ok. They did everything with their hands, that’s what was natural for them at that time. So I got all the materials myself and tried to learn and I only lasted an hour. It’s really generic dreamy, like dream house boards, flowers people would like to have at their wedding, exotic travel landscapes and cityscapes. But in general there haven’t really been a lot of surprises. Or maybe it feels taboo to talk about in a way. I’m used to making every thought into a tweet. If anything I sometimes feel slowed down by it. And he was like, “Wow, good idea, let’s do that!” Before you play, you begin adding what you want to the city. That was my favorite part. It’s like if you don’t already know something you can’t search for it. I use my hands and my hair a lot because you can get a lot of movement out of them. I have this respect for them because they give me the structure I need to feel the freedom to be creative and make work. there is a difference between the light in Berlin, which is kind of blue, as opposed to the light in LA where it’s very orange and beautiful. tired, eating beans alone in my studio I searched for trees. (Text by Ella Plevin)
The History of France in 3D - Bertrand Dezoteux
The History of France in 3D from Bertrand Dezoteux on Vimeo.
Do you have the Shine? - David Kirsch
SMART MOBILITY - Karl altmann
modeling human motion
"One of the most difficult problems in current computer animation is modeling human motion. It is much easier to simulate a flying corporate logo, for example, than to create a simulation of realistic human movement. As a highly articulated and non linear system, the body has yet to yield its secrets fully to computer algorithms. To solve the problem, Robert Abel and his associates marked position points on a human model's body and filmed her while she went through a series of exactly choreographed motions. They then analyzed the film using a computer, creating a data base that provided the basis for the female robot simulation. The juxtaposition of the materially present human model (left) with the simulacrum of the female robot from the computer animated sequence "Brilliance" (right) illustrates the transformations that takes place as the body is translated from a material substrate into pure information. The sequence shows the female robot manipulating objects on a dining table with a facility that is possible only because they have lost their materiality, as she herself has also. (Used with permission from Robert Abel, President of Synapse Technologies, Inc.)"
Cluny 3D
Introduction à la littérature fantastique
