"The Dead Web – La fin" at the Mapping Festival

In Extremis, by Dominique Sirois and Baron Lanteigne, is the result of a very recent collaboration between the two artists. Both a sculpture and video installation—comprising passages between the two—, the work raises the question of the liminal space between the virtual and the real, the materiality of the digital and obsolescence.

Infinitisme.com Forever A Prototype, by Frédérique Laliberté, is an eternally « progressive » web project, an autonomous collage machine that generates semi-random virtual compositions by searching in a bank of categorized and classified digital files: images, sounds, animated gifs, videos, text, etc. The result of each visit is a series of ephemeral constructions, based both on the rigidity of archival processes and on their  casualness. A makeshift Internet, a sort of mimesis of itself, this website can only reuse and renew that which already exists, giving a function to hundreds of giga bytes of latent data. More specifically, the program activates a series of commands that select random files within their respective categories. It then places these organized elements in the virtual canvas of the web page, within well-defined compartments, layers, and sequences. Taking the form of an installation, the project presents itself as a contextual environment: an simulation of a functional device. Incessantly evolving in a virtual space and time, this parallel universe is extirpated from its abstraction when visited by a web user.

The creation of Infinitisme.com Forever A Prototype was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

BPM 37093, by Julie Tremble, is a short 3D animation that « relates » – whether fiction or reality, the uncertainty here is voluntary – the death of a star and the slow transformation of its materiality: As the artist describes, “BPM 37093 is a star, very similar to the sun, which is now dead. Scientists have discovered that by dying, the star has almost completely turned into a diamond, as the sun will do in billions of years. The video is a fantasmatic representation of this scientific phenomenon, [and the] 3D modeling, a tool favored by documentary cinema to deal with astronomical phenomena. The animation diverts this technique, perceived as realistic, to illustrate how our understanding of certain natural phenomena, whose perception is inaccessible to us, depends on fragmentary information, representations, and imagined associations.” This representation of the death of a star, symbolic of the (possible) death of the universe (and incidentally, that of the Internet) is also the birth of something else: here, a diamond. The highly accelerated temporality of this extinction of a star – 1:14 for millions of years – adds resonance to the whole exhibition project, which, putting into question the Web, also questions the notion of duration and instantaneity, as well as our representations of the world, those many synthetic images of which we are right to be wary.

The painting Memento Vastum by Julien Boily – an oil on board – tells us of a lost memory. Vastum (“waste” in Latin) refers to the notion of loss, to what is left behind in favor of a certain idea of progress. The tension between tradition and progress fuels this idea of multifaceted loss in the work of Boily. Loss of know-how, artistic certainly, but also of traditional knowledge immediately replaced by new – often in the form of information or even data. It is a recursive dynamic that is constantly accelerating. With the arrival of novelty, what preceded tends to be evacuated. This notion of vestige crosses, in the work, those of programmed obsolescence and vanity. If in the 17th century the mirror was a recurring element in the composition of vanities – these still lifes evoking the ephemeral character of humanity – today, our electronic devices and computer tools could fulfill the same function. Among these objects that send us the reflection of our desires, our fears and our vanity, is not the Internet like a two-way mirror?

Memento Vastum is part of the Canopée Médias Collection

Comprised of hybrid instruments made out of drumheads and electronic components, Membranes is a performative installation that transforms written text into luminous percussion. Over the course of the emergence of each automatic translation, the network of instruments begins to share the texts, thereby transforming the written elements into visual and sound motifs. In drawing on the example of the West African “talking drum,” Membrane creates a new language that is constantly developing and adapting itself. The instruments form a reactive network of semantic and aesthetic actors: a play of forms, light and sound unfolds between them. In following this archetype of a musical communication instrument and  in seeking to create a speculative acoustic interaction space, this audio-visual installation offers an alternative communication environment.

In its installation form, the work uses texts generated by an algorithm that analyzes a database comprising various theoretical texts about the relation between music and language. A dialogue between the various independent object-instruments takes shape and generates a network of dead agents—transformed algorithms—that testify both to a form of communication that is historically rooted in a cultural tradition and a hypothetical language spoken in a world after the Web’s demise.

The disorganization of the world by financial capitalism, uprooted and volatile, in part fostered the emergence of the Internet. This network has gradually become the matrix through which our communities and individualities have restructured their exchanges. The promise of a greater flow of ideas, increased freedom, and even new forms of citizenship, now comes up against the power of capital and the dislocated and entropic nature of such a technological arrangement.

The Object of the Internet is an installation by Projet EVA (Étienne Grenier et Simon Laroche), evoking the idea of a mausoleum conjuring the end of the Web. Through optical and kinetic processes integrated into a device in which the visitor inserts his head, the human face is broken down into a multitude of fragments. Visitors are projected into a dystopian future where, on social media, only the traces of our selfies, which are artificially animated, remain in the form of a reflection. The latter, condemned to the status of a sterile solipsism, agitates in a sidereal void of the end of the Internet.

At once a screen and mirror, the smartphone, this identity box of each and all, is an object of memory and illusion. The mobile phone and the screen are markers of our era and they also bear the marks of our daily gestures. These ubiquitous devices literally infiltrate every nook cranny of our everyday lives, and have thus cleared the way for the monetization of leisure time. In the process, we have become bound to a form of instantaneousness that simultaneously distances us from the present moment: we are perched on the edge between the virtual and material world. 

The smartphone is an object requiring almost constant attention: we protect it, we talk to it, authorize it to remember moments of our lives and to inform third parties of our every move, so much so that it rapidly becomes irreplaceable: in no time its status changes from a precious and essential object to junk, to a dysfunctional and technological artefact, covered with a greasy film that bears witness to a compulsive use. These panes—shattered into a thousand pieces, trapped in cement, like the fossil traces of a bygone age—once again confront us with our behaviour before the GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) entities. In returning to the state of mere physical mirrors, they also remind us of the eventual end of our digital identity.