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Frédéric Durieu's "experimental zoo" presents an interactive game of "animal manipulation," which, despite the pleasant colours, is much less innocent than it appears to be. On "natural" backdrops or a blank background, animals, like giraffes and penguins, and insects, like mosquitoes and beetles, saunter, swim, or fly about the screen. But the visitor soon learns that he can, with the mouse, transform these bucolic scenes into a disquieting safari: one can take hold of the poor beasts, like the giraffe as it passes by, for instance, and play with it like a beach ball, throw it into the air, drag it across the screen, bring it to the foreground, push it to the back, or pin it down as, powerless, it desperately flings its limbs about. As for the insects, the mouse either squashes them like a fly-swatter - if one catches them (the mosquitoes here are as difficult to exterminate as they are "in real life") -, or blasts them to pieces (a fate reserved for beetles). As Durieu emphasizes in describing his approach, "the goal here is to produce wonderment, like that of a child on discovering a new toy. It's not realism and exactness that I'm looking for, but the offset quality of things, possibly akin to the expression of a universe in two-and-a-half dimensions." Indeed, the giraffes and penguins evolve in a natural decor that appears as just that, decor: colours are too vivid, their exaggerated sharpness lending them a hyper-reality that is almost surreal. It is a circus. One is thrown into the "disturbing strangeness (unheimliche)" that Freud spoke of in connection with dreams, where the impossible suddenly becomes possible, where the real world changes at will - or despite ourselves -, where wishes are fulfilled, the laws of nature transgressed. "These programs are set in motion by complex, generative computer code, based on the transcription of physical laws into mathematical algorithms. To this end, Durieu goes after effects on the fringe of programming, strange and unexpected phenomena that are well-known to programmers and often undesired for the inconsistent results they can yield. In the present case, by way of a line of code, these fringe effects can produce poetry. Such code is then called "algorithmic poetry.""1 Transformation, like thwarting the laws of physics, can produce dreams and poetry, but, lest we forget, can also generate monsters, or at least dangers. Thus, in the manipulation of nature and its deterioration, Durieu's work recalls - ever so discreetly, like an aside - that one is playing with fire.
Anne-Marie Boisvert NOTES: 1- Frédéric Durieu, Artist's Statement |
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