My answers to fisheye magazine about How Digital Technologies Transform the Art World.
What impact do you think digital, VR and immersive technologies will have on artistic proposals, museums and galleries over the next few years?
We can already observe upheavals in the traditional roles of the players in the art world. But first, I’d like to emphasize the distinction between art, the art world and the world of culture. Although they are interconnected, they are often confused by a misuse of language.
Cultural” venues increasingly need to be inventive to attract the younger generation. We’re living in an age of the attention economy, and capturing it is becoming so difficult that certain projects, such as video games, pay their users for a little of their brain power (play to earn). This will organically influence the nature of art production and exhibition “windows”, and it already has.
More and more digital works are flourishing on the networks, but also in major art venues such as biennials. This testifies to an institutional shift.
Artistic proposals can be divided into two types in terms of their production and distribution processes: project economies, and object economies.
In large cultural structures, I think there will be more and more so-called “immersive” proposals, using technological gadgets to stimulate attention (VR, AR, Mapping or who knows what…) a bit like “entertainment”. This applies more to “project economics”. That is, projects that need upstream financing to be produced, and whose purpose is not necessarily to be sold as an “object” on the market. Nevertheless, these works are subject to prior validation by private or public bodies that distribute funding. Like the CNC for cinema in France.
In these “project economies”, we often find immaterial, inter-active, in-situe or epheremere works that can be identified as “digital” (videos, installations, conceptual works, performances, immersive creations, etc.).
Nevertheless, the NFT phenomenon has challenged the economics of these projects, turning some of them into object “economies”.
Indeed, with blockchains, private individuals have begun to acquire jpegs or mp4s. This type of collection was previously reserved for institutions or very rare specialized collectors. Perhaps these digital or conceptual “objects”, which until now have been in the blind spot of the market and art fairs, will allow an intrusion into the digital art market.
Sam learns that the line between art and culture is not always clear, leading to misunderstandings.
In my opinion, there are two pitfalls. On the one hand, standardization of works for the market. On the other, too great a “cultural” gap between reality (which is mutating at breakneck speed) and the vision of those who decide on funding allocations in institutions. (This doesn’t just apply to art; the same pattern can be observed everywhere).
As far as intrinsic artistic proposals are concerned, especially in phases of “cultural” transition, art must remain a disruptive gesture. The risk of confinement in any medium can be self-censorship, due to its intrinsic constraints in relation to the pitfalls mentioned above. The role of artists will be crucial in this change, to make proposals that transcend these tools, and come to question them. This is what I’m trying to do through various projects.
For your part, do you feel that the digital/immersive arts enable you to deliver a more concrete message that would be impossible to defend in any other form?
I originally started out as a painter. Very quickly, I realized that making films would enable me to tell stories with a temporal dimension that only an image could contain. Since then, this process has been the same with any other medium or technology I use. When I work with scientists, I like to use their lab tools to generate something other than scientific data. This is what I did with chemistry and biology in my “Please Love Party” project, where I created a love drug in the lab and gave homeopathic versions of it to guinea pigs at a party I filmed.
Similarly, when I collaborate with computer developers, code becomes a canvas with multiple reading levels, allowing me to introduce a temporal, interactive and organic dimension into digital ecosystems, as in my “xSublimatio” project, which uses blockchain as an artistic medium.
How do you use (sometimes? always? / how? why?) digital tools in your creative process?
There are three dimensions I’d like to address to answer this question: the narrative dimension, the aesthetic dimension and the devices used.
My projects often draw their inspiration from technological and scientific discoveries. However, I have no “tech guru” fascination for these fields. Rather, I like to divert them, create new narratives with them, or re-contextualize them. This often takes the form of science-fiction narratives, in order to move these technologies into other time-spaces and reveal their hidden dimensions. For example, in my project entitled “Mass”, a duo with June Balthazard, we shot a science-fiction film with real physicists from CERN and astrophysicists playing their own roles in the film. The narrative takes place in a scenario of anticipation after an ecological catastrophe where the day no longer dawns. This displacement of reality shows how their discoveries (in this case, the Higgs boson and exo-planets) reveal metaphysical questions that have already been raised by philosophy and tradition for centuries.
From an aesthetic point of view, given that many of my projects have their origins in Internet research, it seems logical to me to use the Internet both as a source of inspiration and as a medium of expression. This is why in my work I like to use the codes and modes of communication that are specific to it, such as the recurrent use of “memes”, which constitute the privileged language of the Internet.
Presentation devices come second. They are often quite “immersive” in the sense that the viewer watching my films is immersed in an environment made up of scenographic objects, sculptures, lights and sounds. But I also think about capturing attention where it is. My latest project involves the creation of a social network, the exhibition space for which will be a cell phone. After all, nothing is more immersive than the endorphins released by the flow of images from an infinite scroll on a phone. The nebulous world of the rabbit hole. The artistic gesture is to allow the public a certain freedom in its navigation, to let it choose the blue pill or the red pill.
No pun intended, but perhaps with advances in artificial intelligence combined with advances in chemistry, it will be possible that in 50 years’ time, exhibitions will be done with micro-doses of drugs to offer people even more “immersive” dopamine-releasing experiences.
In the digital age, it’s said that anyone can claim to be an artist, that “pushing a few buttons” (to quote a phrase read in some interviews) doesn’t make us artists. What’s your take on this?
Art is a kind of symbolic egregore, playing a central role in the preservation of privilege and the representation of cultures.
It can thus serve as a vehicle for asserting identities that are associated with certain social or cultural groups.
What’s currently happening with the combination of the NFTs movement, the democratization of artificial intelligence tools and their exposure on networks is very interesting.
Because it gives a significant voice to forms and symbols attributed to subcultures stemming from Internet culture, which evolve too quickly to be recuperated by the dominant culture, as has been the case in many other so-called “underground” movements that have been totally digested by the art world, such as street-art.
This phenomenon brings together people around the same aesthetic issues, without hierarchy, who were never meant to meet in the agora.
It also arouses a great deal of passion, because nobody wants to lose their privileges.
For example, artists who have developed practices with an “artisanal” dimension fear that their “know-how” will become obsolete, while graphic designers or “creative hobbyists” sometimes find new opportunities to show and sell their work.
That’s what happened with NFT. The contemporary art world is a little afraid of the intrusion of aesthetics from cultures that use codes that are not their own. This Internet aesthetic, the “Tumblr” graphic, has been around for a long time, but its arrival on the market has created a parallel economy, thanks in particular to the arrival of new collectors from the tech world, who don’t have the same criteria for appreciating what art is.
On the other hand, I observe that these new players (whether emerging artists thanks to technology or new crypto-rich collectors) are paradoxically almost all looking for institutional validation of the art world, often without any real knowledge of its history and issues, and all the while criticizing its legitimacy.
It’s a back-and-forth game between the affirmation of an aesthetic rupture and the desire for filiation with the art-historical tradition.
What’s more, the emergence of tools for generating images or text using artificial intelligence is pushing us to consider art more as a creative process than as a finished object. This brings back to the fore the age-old questions surrounding conceptual art, often overshadowed by the concerns of the market or pop culture. Although the Internet has somewhat put an end to art criticism, partly due to the problems associated with the attention economy and headline culture, it’s interesting to see these aesthetic questions re-emerge on social networks, even if they are often approached in a clumsy way. The culture surrounding NFTs has put the notion of community back at the heart of the artistic validation process. On a conceptual level, and in the current political context (dysfunctional democracies in the age of the Internet and disinformation), I find it very interesting that these aesthetic and philosophical questions are subject to consensus. The questions addressed in art are often prefigurations of the future in other areas of society.
In your opinion, is France lagging behind in the digital/immersive arts? What’s missing to make Paris the equivalent of Montreal, Brussels, London or even Taiwan?
In France, there’s often a tendency to segment fields such as contemporary art, digital arts, cinema, network content production and so on. My intuition is that we need to encourage greater porosity between these fields and bring art and Internet culture closer together. By this I mean effective, more inclusive collaboration for the general public, but also greater curiosity on the part of decision-makers. However, this discourse is often misunderstood in the art world, or treated in a purely conceptual or “exotic” way. For example, some artists create video games for an exhibition because video games are a trend, but in reality, nobody actually plays them. This creates a kind of ecosystem that says “we’ve marked out this territory between us”, when in reality this isn’t the case. It might be wiser to set up collaborations between artists and major video game studios.
With the advent of networks and blockchains, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to cheat reality. Friction is inevitable between the digital world and the art world, because one of the promises of the Internet is decentralization, transparency and open source sharing, while the traditional functioning of power structures in (politics, business and art) has for centuries been based on the retention of information and centralization. The problem is that the latter will never be as quick to make decisions as the reality of the world’s mutations. Especially the digital world. Which means they’re almost always out of step with the reality of “contemporary” art.
I wouldn’t say that France is lagging behind, as we have a tradition of revolutions, contestations and debates, which could on the contrary place us in the vanguard of attempts at decentralization and collective energies, even with a view to future applications in the political arena. I believe that artists have a role to play in this kind of experimentation. Decentralized production, curation and presentation initiatives are of great interest to me, even if for technological and pedagogical reasons their practical implementation is still very complex.
Question from Maxime Delcourt for Fisheye immersive.
