MIRAGE FESTIVAL

Molior and Mirage Festival are joining forces for a first collaboration through the presentation of 3 digital works by 4 artists from Québec. They are coproducing a new work by Sabrina Ratté Machine for Living, which will be shown for the first time in installation form. Through its composition of 5 large video projections and mirrors, it unfolds as a truly immersive architectural structure made up of labyrinthine paths.

Molior and Mirage will also exhibit the robotic and interactive installation by Simon Laroche and David Szanto Orchestrer la perte / Perpetual Demotion and present the performance by Lucas Paris AntiVolume IN/EXT.

This year, Mirage festival is focusing on works that articulate multiple spatial dimensions and draw the viewer into unusual sensorial spaces in order to make them experience other realities. They stimulate the public’s engagement by offering it experiences of a fictional, dreamy or a virtual order. 

The selection of works developed by Mirage Festival and Molior took four specific thematic main lines into account to approach the experience of other realities: The first refers to the relation of real/virtual/actual architecture spaces; the second to man/machine interactions; the third, to the experience of a synesthetic environment.

Sabrina Ratté made her videos during a residency at Château Éphémère in Carrière-sous-Poissy. She created architectures by drawing inspiration from the large housing projects of the Parisian suburbs and new cities such as Noisy-le-Grand, Créteil, la Grande Borne, la Défense and Cergy-Pontoise. The videos are animated by textures, colours and forms whose aesthetic is reminiscent of technologies from other periods, such as video synthesizers, mixers and visual feedbacks. “The aesthetic of the new cities is transformed, manipulated and deconstructed to be reborn in the form of environments that are at once abstract and recognizable, surreal but evocative of a certain known reality.(1)” The video projections that partition and arrange the exhibition space, form walls and a path to bypass them that viewers can move through.

The sound dimension created by Roger Tellier Craig is comprised of five tracks, each of which is assigned to a video and localized. The listening experience of the sound entity made up of these tracks varies according to the viewer’s position. 

Mirrors mounted on each side of the screens echo the images and thus extend them. The doubling by the mirrors and some formal iterations in the 5 videos produce a repetitive effect similar to the collective housing units and blur the boundaries of the experienced space.

The multiplicity of the spaces’ dimensions reappears in the image, through the referenced architectural structures and the recognizable elements and textures that appear to be digital or derived from a recording of the real. The installation highlights this effect in the correspondences between the multiple videos and by the uncertain demarcations of the actual space.

Orchestrer la perte / Perpetual Demotion, a robotic installation, feeds the humans that stand in front of it. Its robotic arm descends to pick up a spoon. An edible paste is placed on it. The arm unbends and then moves towards the mouth of the viewer, who can decide to accept the mouthful and ingest it. The machine then returns the spoon to its slave, a human by its side, who assists it by then removing the used spoon.

The installation requires the physical participation of the viewer, who must coordinate his or her body with the robot and thus calls on the sense of sight, proprioception and, lastly, taste. The aesthetic experience extends into the viewers’ inner body space, since they must consent to being fed and ingesting the food paste.

The work plays on the trust the viewer is willing to place in the artist, on the one hand, and on the other in the machine, in a complex context that has the power of persuading them. It stages the take over, by way of an automated robotic and intrusive apparatus, of an everyday activity, “to eat.” By extension, this stimulates reflection about the development and implication in our societies of artificial intelligence systems or robots, who are increasingly managing our lives, from the most intimate arena to the broad social sphere. The work revisits the relationship of the dominant and dominated between the human and machine in “a context of technological determination orchestrating a generalized loss of control.(2)”

These power relations thus reappear on many levels and are multi-directional, not only in technology’s relationship to human beings but also to microbes. Some of the fermented ingredients are mixed and brought into interaction with other pasteurised ones. “The work opens a compelling perspective on the systemic and performative aspects of food (3)” and examines food-related biological, economic and socio-cultural issues.” The work’s presentation in the capital of French gastronomy further underscores this aspect and is certain to spark a discussion about the place of food as a territorial reference and indicator of particular behaviours. It confronts viewers with their own cultural representation of food, whether in reference to their experience, memory or emotion. Since our food defines us: what we eat defines who we are and who we are not (4), it puts the public in a situation that triggers an encounter with the other and other realities.

During the performance AntiVolume IN/EXT, Lucas Paris develops a live and at time improvised composition using both sound and light that immerses the viewer in a meditative state. Three LED columns are placed on the stage where they modulate the space according to their light variations. The artist draws inspiration from electronic musical forms such as noise, electronica and ambient music. He views his project as a “volatile and energetic sculpture (5)” the intensity of which he varies between granular effects and encompassing layers. The work instils a “physical and textural (6)” experience. The experience immerses and captivates the public in an aural and visual, but also proprioceptive synaesthesia, i.e. a similarity and translation between the stimuli inputs of the sound and light, as well as the sensations proper to one’s body. The whole of the performance transports the public into its intangible environment, while the light and sound penetrate and circulate through the entire body.

Aurélie Besson

-

The Mirage Festival has been exploring the diversity of digital cultures for six years. It invites the general public to discover the plurality of these cultures and acts as a catalyzer for an entire ecosystem of players in the artistic, cultural or creative industry sector.

The first event dedicated to digital cultures in Lyon, the Mirage Festival has succeeded in making itself an important player in Lyon’s vast cultural events offer by proposing a multidisciplinary, ambitious, groundbreaking and adventurous programming that provides a glimpse of what lies on the creative horizon.

The exhibition captivated the Lyon public and enthusiasts of visual, sound, graphic, kinetic and interactive experiences. The live evenings, a mix of concerts and performances, highlighted emerging projects alongside internationally renowned artists. The event’s specificity also emerged in relation to its reflective component: conferences, panel discussions, and project presentations completed its general pubic offer and made it a unifying gathering for all the players of the city’s digital creative scene. This constantly evolving scene can finally boast of an event that is agile enough to represent it and able to seize the major trends at the heart of the  dialogue between 3.0 tech companies, researchers and artists.

Far from being a simple technical demonstration to the glory of the digital, the festival distinguished itself by casting a sharp eye on the links between artistic creation and technology. A recognized expertise that has led the festival to intervene on the national stage and beyond (Seoul, Bogota, Athens, Amsterdam, Belgrade etc.).

In acting on viewers’ spatial and sometimes sensorial dimensions, but above all by stimulating the power of their imagination, the works shown as part of the exhibition invite the public to “experiment with other realities,” whether they be virtual, sensorial or parallel! In creating set-ups designed for experimentation, the artists physically involve viewers, who are placed in a fictional, dreamy, virtual world that modifies their environment and appeals to their senses. The artists thus seek to change our relationship to the real and bring forth new realities with undefined borders and indistinct contours. Consequently, there is no longer a single and unique reality, but several realities.

-

This project has received support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Molior would like to thank its partner Mirage festival, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts de Montréal and the Délégation générale du Québec à Paris for their invaluable collaboration.

-

(1) Artists’ work description text.

(2) Artists’ work description text.

(3) Artists’ work description text.

(4) In reference of the ideas put forth by Lisa Heldke, “But Is It Authentic? Culinary Travel and the Search for the ‘Genuine Article’,” in The Taste Culture Reader. 2005 : Oxford.

(5) Artists’ work description text.

(6) Artists’ work description text.