eARTS BEYOND : Shanghai International Gallery Exhibition of Media Art

Tact is an interactive video installation that can be controlled using a touch-sensitive screen. It sets up a meeting between the participant and an anonymous person located on the other side of the screen. The Tact program links video sequences in response to the participant’s various manipulations. Without using words, participants are invited to engage in gesticulative dialogue. By touching and rubbing, they eventually discover they are provoking unusual reactions from their virtual partner.

Literally, the word “tact” is synonymous with the sense of touch. Figuratively, however, it also means an intuitive, spontaneous and thoughtful appreciation of how it is appropriate to behave in a human relationship. The Tact project demonstrates the increasing presence of electronic mediation in interpersonal exchanges. The recent emergence of various network communication services (e-mail, forums, electronic chat) is giving rise to a particular type of public space where social relations are often filtered by anonymity or artificial identities. In many cases, these can be seen as an opportunity for openly expressing ourselves with others without actually exposing ourselves personally. Technology then plays a paradoxical role in that it provides direct access to others while maintaining a protective distance. In this kind of relationship, a strange mixture of inhibition and exhibition seems to appear.
 

Having dealt with landscape and the idea of immersion for the last decade, Luc Courchesne’s photographic work has drawn out the visual and symbolic significance of boundaries, abrupt transitions, thresholds. In the last two years, adapting his panoramic optical systems to video, Courchesne has focused his attention on seashores—the locus, he finds, of perpetually changing boundaries, a kind of continuous negotiation between two states, the dynamic meeting of two emphatically different and mutually transformative substances. Here, Courchesne tells us, one may read a metaphor for interpersonal relationships and the occasion for a fascinating artistic experience that consists in observing a line formed and transformed in a process at once repetitive and random.

Having dealt with landscape and the idea of immersion for the last decade, Luc Courchesne’s photographic work has drawn out the visual and symbolic significance of boundaries, abrupt transitions, thresholds. In the last two years, adapting his panoramic optical systems to video, Courchesne has focused his attention on seashores—the locus, he finds, of perpetually changing boundaries, a kind of continuous negotiation between two states, the dynamic meeting of two emphatically different and mutually transformative substances. Here, Courchesne tells us, one may read a metaphor for interpersonal relationships and the occasion for a fascinating artistic experience that consists in observing a line formed and transformed in a process at once repetitive and random.