zone de confluences

Paul, the newest OIKOS member, and I visited the zone de confluences at Villette Numerique 2004. It's a digital art expo (21 Sept - 3 Oct) that explores the way technology changes our perception of time and space... There are some pretty cool video installations. Many of the artists I had never heard of...at any rate, this kind of art expo is a rare treat in Paris... the new media world still has a distinct anglo flavor and doesn't usually show up on french radar. It was interesting that the majority of the installations used English whenever language was important. For example, David Sadison's work is called Rage Love Hope Despair, "algorithms punctuate the architectural space with the emotional behaviours and moods of human beings as a new theme."

It made me ask the question as to whether we think more often in words or in pictures. I know that I tend to think in pictures. Seeing the words representing behaviors and emotions projected on each others faces was far more moving than seeing them against a wall. Interestingly, a young french woman sharing the same space with us mentionned that she felt "Un décalage émotionnel" (emotional distance) because the words were in english. The word "pain" was projected in red across her mouth as she spoke. I wonder if words, as symbols of what is real, don't always create an emotional distance. It seems to me that images which simulate what is real will always bring us closer to a "real" experience than words can. That distance must be even greater when the language used is your second or third or not "your" language. These words rambling out from my fingers through my keyboard and onto your screen may just bring you further and further from any semblance of the real... it's even better than the real thing.

One of the goodies we found was this clip called We accept. It is the artist's (D-Fuse) attack on the the commercial invasion of the internet. Paul is basking in the aggressive scan light of an omnipresent visa card. You can download the quicktime video here for free!

the whole expo is organized around "des mots clès" or key words/concepts. This page is only in French, but it will link you to a wealth of knowledge (often in English) on concepts like mixed reality and ethnomethodology as well as links to artists exploring ideas like mobilité, simulation, narration, and noosphère. I know these "mots clès" are just words and, more often than not, french words but they do stimulate color, space, and movement...at least in my mind.

tell me if you can. is this really Paul or just a simulation? it looks like paul, but was he really at the expo? was he there the same time i was? do you really know? you don't do you.

Comments

[Stephen Garner]

Thanks for the links. The first photo reminded me of William Gibson's comment that we're all "wrapped in media" - of technology producing a "consensual hallucination."

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

[David Finley]

Jonathan:
I wonder if words, as symbols of what is real, don't always create an emotional distance. It seems to me that images which simulate what is real will always bring us closer to a "real" experience than words can.

ME:
Your reflections bring to mind one of my favorite poems, Words by Dana Gioia. Check it out here:

Speaking as someone who thinks more in sounds and words than images, I must appeal to Gioia's statement in the third stanza: "To name is to know and remember." While creating distance from the "real", words also give clarity and shape to the shifting interpretations that mere images give. The world does not need words, but I do. We do.

[Jonathan Finley]

brother, as you know well, i too need and love words. isn't "confluence" just a great word? in saying that "images bring us closer," it wasn't my intention to suggest that "mere" images (or did you mean mirror images :-) are more important or better than words... yes, we need words. my question, a raw reaction to an art exhibit, has to do with the relationship between words and images (both being symbols of "the real"). it would seem, and i think you would agree, that images can invest words with new or different meaning. just as to name something is to impose a certain meaning, the interpretation of words also shifts when images are superimposed on them... this interplay frames our perception, forces us to understand differently, to experience "the real" differently. all art seeks to impose a particular vision, to make us see as the artist would have us see... but my sense is that a gap (emotional or otherwise) always remains. there is no such thing as the pure transfer of vision from one to another. whatever the media/symbols employed might be, some distortion is always introduced in the transfer... even between brothers; :-)

i would be interested to HEAR your reflections, as a musician/poet, as to how you SEE sound entering into the confluence of words and images.

ps did you get that i-sight camera yet? mine works great!

[Jonathan Finley]

thanks, steve, for linking to this post from way downunder... after having neglected my blog for the last several months, i wasn't sure if any of the 13 or so people that read it were still coming to visit..

[Jonathan Finley]

Welcome to the World
by David Finley

You can carry in your tiny grasp
a joy that can not be contained

I can try to force to language
that with which words can never be fully named

That's that you are loved
Welcome to the world, little one
You are loved