Centre d’art Le Lait, Albi, 2020

PERSONA EVERYWARE

Many artists, who are keenly aware of the place occu­pied in contem­po­rary life by the digi­tal tech­no­lo­gies, the deve­lop­ment of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gen­ceand the use of social net­works, are explo­ring the chal­len­ges of these new com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools and prac­ti­ces.

By increa­sing the amount of appa­ra­tus connec­ted to our dis­po­si­tion, ubi­qui­tous com­pu­ter tech­no­logy, or ‘eve­ry­ware’ (a contrac­tion of eve­ryw­here and hard/soft­ware), to borrow Adam Greenfield’s term, has made it easier for all of us to have access to infor­ma­tion and data, eve­ryw­here and all the time. Everyware has also played a part in spee­ding up the trans­mis­sion and dis­tri­bu­tion of texts, images, and videos of a more or less per­so­nal nature. It makes it pos­si­ble to express an opi­nion, exchange views, and cri­ti­cize, as well, in a cer­tain way, as “prin­ting” the move­ments of society. The huge volume of data exchan­ged on a daily basis thus traces a media- and “in­fos­phere-“re­la­ted envi­ron­ment, whose inten­sity is fore­ver influen­cing and reconfi­gu­ring our rea­li­ties and our iden­ti­ties.

 

The artists in the exhi­bi­tion Persona Everyware appro­priate and handle this mass of data and affects, work with (and at times against) them, try and make them (in)visi­ble, and res­tore a voice and a phy­si­cal pre­sence to contents that are too often regar­ded as imma­te­rial. What is invol­ved, for them, is len­ding pers­pec­tive to the aes­the­tic, poetic and per­for­ma­tive poten­tial of our eve­ry­day inte­rac­tions.

In dea­ling with the Internet, and with the social net­works in par­ti­cu­lar, as much as an arena of a sub­jec­tive mode of expres­sion or a form of ‘self-wri­ting’ as a public space and a stage, they ques­tion the rela­tions that the indi­vi­dual has with his own image and society. Subtle rela­tions are thus made bet­ween an “I” and a “we”, which are being cons­tantly reconfi­gu­red in rela­tion to each other.

From this thea­trum mundi, which is in a total state of flux and staked out by screens, there emerge here and there the masked faces of one or two per­so­nae, through which the inti­mate and the col­lec­tive, the pri­vate and the public, rea­lity and fic­tion, and sen­si­bi­lity and tech­no­logy over­lap and merge.

08 February - 20 September 2020
With Pedro Barateiro, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Guillaume Constantin, Kevin Desbouis, Eleni Kamma, Anouk Kruithof, Ingrid Luche

Curators :

Raphaël Brunel, Antoine Marchand et Anne-Lou Vicente

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