Essai paru sur timeart – Space for Time-based Media Art, une plateforme web basée à Séoul.

Y sont abordé des oeuvres de Baron Lanteigne & Dominique Sirois, Sabrina Ratté et Marie-Ève Levasseur.

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Essay published in timeart – Space for Time-based Media Art, a web platform based in Seoul.

It features works by Baron Lanteigne & Dominique Sirois, Sabrina Ratté et Marie-Ève Levasseur.

The digital universe is this falsely cloudy and immaterial^[2] doppelganger evolving in parallel with our tangible and very concrete world. Screens and related devices of diffusion allow us access. And by doing so, we also access things unthought, located somewhere beyond the uncanny valley^[3]. While the use of a projector tends to make us forget the conditions of existence of CGI, the screen device reminds us of the complexity to which these images are attached: they have no reality outside the software and computer constraints. They present themselves to us most often as visions of parallel worlds, so different from what we experience in our reality that we could qualify them as alien in the sense of extreme otherness. Think of the luminosity, the brightness, the glitch, the way forms merge and fragment, move and interweave. Let’s also think about hyper-realism which is itself another level of strangeness. This radical distance before the visual potential of the digital is short-circuited by the proximity that we maintain with these technologies in everyday life: their omnipresence now has the weight of an almost permanent mental load. This results in our paradoxical relationship with the digital world; it is simultaneously ultra-familiar and hyper-foreign. And this constant negotiation escapes us as it has become intrinsic to our lives. Technological objects have this not-even-hidden agenda of acting as extensions of ourselves: they are almost prostheses with intentions, interactive mirrors. The reality of the hardware behind the code, and the software that “animates” the foreground, is inseparable from the device that allows the coherence of the whole. Whether it is a TV monitor, a tablet, a cell phone, a virtual reality headset screen, or any other surface receiving data from a DIY micro-controller or a super-powerful computer, the surface of the screen is that indefinable space that allows the unthought of to emerge.

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[Image: Sabrina Ratté & Guillaume Arseneault (sounds: Roger Tellier Craig), Distributed Memories, 2021, Interactive Installation. Photo by Emily Gan. Courtesy of the artist]

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