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Paris
Connection is
co-produced and co-published by Arteonline.arq.br
(Rio), Coriolisweb.org
(Toronto), dichtung-digital.org
(Berlin), Turbulence.org
(New York). It contains introductions to,
interviews with, and reviews on: Jean-Jacques
Birgé, Nicolaus Clauss,
Frédéric Durieu, Jean-Luc Lamarque,
Antoine Schmitt, Servovalve. For French, Portuguese
and Spanish version see: http://vispo.com/thefrenchartists.
The version on dichtung-digitial is made possible
by ZKM. | Birgé | Clauss | Durieu | Lamarque | Schmitt | Servovalve |
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INTRODUCTION
by Helen Thorington I interacted with
Clauss’s
works. I laughed. I
had fun. Turbulence spotlighted Clauss’ work;
I spoke with my students about him, and later, as I came to
know the work of other members of this loosely knit Parisian
group of artists, I spoke about them as well. The students’
response was similar to my own. There is a huge difference,
a friend recently remarked, between learning and
experiencing. What you get with these artists is an
experience. And it’s easy. This, by the way, is a
compliment. In a medium where work can so easily exhaust you
with complications, overload you with information, take so
much time to navigate that you end up, metaphorically at
least, tearing your hair out in frustration, here are simple
works that use the medium, are easily accessible and in
which one can sense both the presence of the artists (still)
and their human concerns. |
"Right now we are still close to the time when painting, sound, motion belonged in separate identifiable categories and we speak of their synthesis as multimedia &But there is a merging, a transformation that the “new profession” makes possible– intermedia was the word Dick Higgins used. You can see it in these works. And they leave nothing behind." |
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Yes they are. Move from Clauss to Durieu
and the "Oeil
Complex":
unencumbered with the knowledge of Platonic solids (see
Andrews's review
of "Oeil Complex") I encountered the eyes as a creature—something
with unusual form but alive and giving expression to
feeling, perhaps desperation, as Durieu suggests, perhaps
fear and bewilderment as I experienced it. I’m easy. I want to
experience art first, study it after. I felt something for
this creature, just as I felt something (delight) for the
wobbly-legged animals in Durieu’s and Birgé's
zoo
as my actions caused them to trip over themselves, get tied
in knots, only to right themselves and regain their
composure as independent semi-autonomous creatures when
finally I left them alone. Or move to Schmitt’s
darker, more minimal work, where the struggle of stick
creatures in “Avec
determination”
strikes a human chord even before one understands that the
programming work is inextricable from the work’s
meaning—that these seemingly fragile semi-autonomous
beings implemented in algorithms are forever confined to
environments created for them and behaviors made possible
within them. Stuck in this hopeless situation, they have the
force of what Roberto Simanowski calls a double life—they
are creatures caught in boxes and they are symbols,
representing the viewer, who, momentarily in control, sends
them crashing hopelessly against the limits of their
environments with the simple movement of his
mouse (review).
Inclining more to the
musical side, there’s Lamarque’s interactive
visual music instrument, Pianographique—I’m
not sure it’s important to resolve the question of
whether it’s a work of art or a tool. It is one of a
very few truly noteworthy interactive works online that
combines music and image and is a pleasure to play with. And
there’s servovalve ‘s work—minimal, set in
a black background, its images in motion with its sound,
both beautiful to watch and listen to. Try www.servovalve.org/2001/0621/0621.html
("ohon") or www.servovalve.org/2001/1028/1028.html
("electrotomy") Or www.servovalve.org/2003/0104/0104.html
("search: ubanizer--11"), a visually more complex work. It’s
not hard to imagine performing with these
programming-controlled transformations, as servovalve does.
But it is also an absorbing experience to watch/listen, and
be carried off into their mysterious, sometimes ominous, but
always communicating worlds. Algorithmic poetry may very
well be a good description for them all—if one takes
poetry to be an all-encompassing term, rather than a
division of literature. The mathematics—the
programming—are at the service of the art, at the
service of synthesis, at the service of human intelligible
meaning and emotion. Actually inseparable from them. The “new
profession of programming,” as Birgé calls it,
is well served by all these artists. Nicolas Clauss speaks of his
interest in the in-between. There is something of the
in-between in all these works. Something that reminds me of
Ann McCaffrey’s popular novels about dragon riders and
wizards, where those who travel between universes travel
without sight or hearing, but at the same time, “leave
nothing behind.” In the way in
which we talk about these six artists one can sense that we
are in an in-between. We may not know what art will be in
twenty or thirty years, but we can be sure we will not talk
about it in the same way, any more than we now talk about
performance art in terms of the discipline from which it
emerged and those that contributed to its development. Right
now we are still close to the time when painting, sound,
motion belonged in separate identifiable categories and we
speak of their synthesis as multimedia &But there is a
merging, a transformation that the “new profession”
makes possible–intermedia was the word Dick Higgins
used. You can see it in these works. And they leave nothing
behind. |
