Une dent sur le pouce : a time unlike any other
from 2th of July to 29th of August 2020
Thursday to Saturday – from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm
At Plateforme Intermedia / La Fabrique – 4 boulevard Léon Bureau – 44200 – île de Nantes
Impromptu Vernissage on July 2nd at 6:30 pm (bring your glass!)
closed on August 15
Relaxed muscle – Sound installation, infinite drone.
Le Désert Rue – Collaborative film produced during confinement.
SandOnSand – Continuous filming during the exhibition: Outdoor view and sound ecology.
Transposed Memory – A participatory sound piece that will be performed with visitors throughout the exhibition.
Artistic zapping of confinement– Small architectures to accommodate post-confinement streams.
Disappearance of the media – Process of fossilization of the media of our time.
Copy/Paste – Piksel Cyber Salon, a virtual space hosting part of the hybrid exhibition COPY PASTE, live performance activities and workshops of the Piksel Fest Spill 2020 program.
Following on from the previous exhibition “We are all media “ the summer expo will bring together some of the passionate and inventive communities that have established new ways of connecting and creating during the covid 19 confinement.
Artists are rarely defeated by the circumstances imposed by the societies or times in which they live, and the coronavirus is no exception. Online communities sprang up and established a place that allowed artists and audiences to exchange and discover local artists and connect with international audiences and local audiences to discover international artists in addition to fully benefiting from all aspects of social media and virtual spaces of the internet.
The summer exhibition seeks to present some of the most active of these projects through the creation of physical architectures (maquets) and designs developed from social media performances and virtual art aesthetics.
Web culture has existed since the mid-1990’s when artists first colonised the internet. They saw this virtual space as a new utopia; free from boundaries and borders, a “space for freedom”, freedom of expression, including the expression of identity, a space where the marginalised could find their voice, their community and their free expression. During this utopian era of the world wide web, there was great hope for a virtual world where race / gender does not matter.
Internet art is participatory, it creates virtual spaces of interaction and networks of communication, using software, servers, websites, surveillance tools, social media, networks, apps and the internet of things.
20 years on and we are confronted with the transformation of the Internet into an instrument of state oppression and the acceleration of capitalism. From Social medias’ facial recognition databases and mass data collection of our digital activities sold off for the analysis by various commercial interests, to the more sinister and secretive politically sponsored data harvesting, such as those deployed by Cambridge Analytica to manipulate and target voters during the Brexit referendum and finally the state infrastructures such as the NSA (National Security Agency in the US) and GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters in the Uk) were revealed by Edward Snowdon to keep all communication from the private individual regardless of suspect behaviour.
Today, we are no longer just a physical body but also a data body.
Through gps navigation, connected travel cards and smart phone localisation our movements are tracked. Through loyalty cards, online purchases to connected appliances our consumption and choices are recorded. Through emails, social media chats and searches our communication and interests are archived. All in all this big data drawn from our virtual footprints lead to a fairly accurate portrait of an individual, our choices, lifestyle, ideas and concerns, all of which can be analysed and manipulated by big business or state tools.
Convinced by our fears and security the old adage of the surveillance state “if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear”, we now have nowhere to hide, the right to privacy is a past dream and Orwell’s “thought police” are on the march.