work 1
L'attente / The Waiting, by Grégory Chatonsky (France), 2007
CONTEMPLATING THE FLOW
The image covers the computer screen as if it were the projection in a cinema theater. Moving portraits of people waiting in a train station blend with photos from diverse sources. Some are large and realistic, while others appear pixelated, almost unrecognizable. A flash and the click of a camera mark the transitions. Lines of text of different sizes run horizontally across the screen. 8 minutes ago, Munchflower said "I love you more than monkeys and bunnies with tentacles" from Oregon, USA. 13 minutes ago, danusia said "será que eu vou ou não vou no skol beats?" from Brazil. 2 minutes ago, erfan said ".10" from Iran. Sometimes, a large word covers the whole screen, superimposed over the photos. Other times, it is just a quick succession of snapshots. Images and text create fleeting compositions in which, for a second, we are tempted to see the cover of a book, the opening credits of a film, a magazine spread, an advertisement, a collage by Barbara Kruger, and none of the above.
L'attente/The Waiting by Grégory Chatonsky is a net art piece that feeds from the data on the Internet to create an open, never-ending fiction in real time. Built as a mashup1, it retrieves content from the APIs of several popular sites (photos from Flickr, posts from Twitter, sound effects from Odeo) and mixes them dynamically with a pre-recorded video of people at a train station and a soundtrack composed by the artist, all in a tidy Flash presentation. Apart from the video and the soundtrack, which constitute the main frame of the work, all other contents are incorporated in real time. This makes each viewing session unique, as the contents and their combination cannot be reproduced again. The connection between image and text is generated by the network itself: the program extracts text from the posts that users write in Twitter, then selects some words to perform a search on the Flickr database and retrieve photos with matching keywords.
The result is quite dadaistic, merging randomness with unexpected associations, in the manner of an exquisite corpse. Chatonsky aims to create, as the dadaists did, a new form of narration from decontextualized fragments that are presented as a single body. The reader must then extract a meaning out of these contents and try to elaborate a sense, a story, by making connections with his or her own experiences. "I divert flows to create a story", says the artist, "It is a principle of translation. On the Internet, an image is a word and, without the latter, I cannot find the image, which is invisible for present-day search engines. Of course, when we take a word and search for the corresponding image, there are absurd matches."2 The inexhaustible source of data that the Internet is theoretically ensures an infinite amount of material to be continuously mixed, but such endless recombination is not actually the subject of this piece. The appropriation of the commonplace to create an artwork that is in the end constantly being reshaped by its own audience could be seen as a radical take on Pop Art, yet this audiovisual collage goes beyond the consecration of Flickr in the manner of Warhol's Campbell Soup cans. We are not confronted with products, but with people. The main contents provided by the artist are images of people waiting. Their faces stare at the void, they are in a state of contemplation. The same state is demanded of the viewer, who would usually be interacting with the piece in some way, but must in this case sit back and observe, as if watching a movie. Film is a constant reference in Chatonsky's work, which includes tributes to Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch3. As the artist states: "the use of darkness is one of the connecting threads of my work (...) It is maybe also a way to watch the Internet as if in a dark cinema room, in this waiting and loss of oneself"4. We are forced to wait and see, as the text runs across the screen and gradually vanishes, sometimes leaving us to wonder how the sentence ends. Along with the text, other images appear: some illustrate particular words, such as a photograph of a lightning strike linked to the word "storm". Others (the square and pixelated ones) are the icons of Twitter users, mainly a photo of the person sitting in front of the computer or a cartoon character or logo. These photos pop in with a flash and the familiar click of a camera, suggesting that we are, as L.B Jeffries in Hitchcock's film Rear Window (1954), chair bound voyeurs who spy on the lives of others on the web. We are observing people, their image of themselves (as defined by their icons) and their thoughts (as expressed in Twitter posts), together with images of how the web (or Flickr in this case) interprets particular words. We thus establish a connection with a certain stream of consciousness in the network, and as observers, we do not act but rather wait and let things pass before us. We are as the angel Damiel in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987), another filmic reference to which the artist points out: "to listen as an angel distant and proximate the inner voice of people, to place the hand on their insensible shoulder, to hold without being able to hold back"5. The impossibility to retain is a key element of this piece: we are not in front of a generator of fixed compositions, but contemplating a flow that is continuously evolving in front of our eyes.
FROM ZEITGEIST TO FLUßGEIST
Since 2002, Grégory Chatonsky has been interested in the adoption of the German expression "Zeitgeist" ("the spirit of the time") by Internet media giants such as Flickr, Yahoo or Google. The fact that this term (which was born in the atmosphere of German Romanticism to refer to a dominant cultural climate at a particular time or era) has infiltrated the network culture indicates the will to grasp a sense of our time by analyzing the vast flow of data on the Internet.
Chatonsky sees two ways of confronting this flow6, one being its translation into another form of visualization in order to extract an interpretation, a summary; the other being its fictionalization, creating new invented content that adds to the flow.
Drawing from both options the artist elaborates a third one, the generation of a fiction by extracting and recombining the actual data on the flow.
This is a fiction without narrative7, a constant flow of content without the guiding voice of a narrator that would provide a final meaning.
The resulting product expresses the "Flußgeist", the "spirit of the flow", a term coined by Chatonsky for a series of works which opens with L'attente/The Waiting, although this is the fifth to address the subject8. After the (voyeuristic) contemplation that this first piece represents, the works that follow address the flow in different ways.
Le registre/ The Register - Flußgeist 2 (2007, with Claude Le Berre) is a utopian, borgesque attempt to store the flow in the form of a book. A program traces down blog and chat posts looking for a set of predefined words related to the expression of feelings. These posts are then collected and put in a book layout that is sent to Lulu.com for the users to order a print-on-demand copy. Titled "Registre des sentiments", already two books have been published, and as the series grows an infinite library could be created.
Insulaires/ Islanders - Flußgeist 3 (2007) focuses on the physical location of Internet users on the planet, a subject that is subtly mentioned in L'attente. The artist "pays a visit" to the people visiting his website by collecting their data and merging it with Google Maps in an animation that jumps from one city to another, indicating the number of "islanders" in each location. The title comes from a text by Jean Cocteau in which he states that we are all members of a shattered island, and that art is the secret signal that connects us all.
Le peuple manque - Flußgeist 4 (2007, with Jean Pierre Balpe), the last work of the series to date, addresses the subject of the fictionalization of the flow, and the fact that the lives we live on the Internet are not our real lives. A text generator developed by Jean Pierre Balpe creates fictional biographies, which are then fed with photographs taken from Flickr. Thus, the memories of real people become the documents for the false memories of fictional individuals (in a similar way to the fake childhood photographs of the replicants in Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner). As with the other pieces, the constant feed of data from the Internet makes this work virtually endless.
All these works develop a form of translation, remixing and reinterpretation of the unceasing flow of information on the Internet, yet not as mere abstract data, but rather extracting its human side and turning it into a fiction. Composed of a myriad of small fragments, the flow becomes a (shattered) mirror, in which we see an image of ourselves and of our time.
Notes
1 : "Mashups: The new breed of Web app"
at Webmashup.com Blog. 
2 : Dominique Moulon. "Grégory Chatonsky. Une esthétique des flux", in IMAGES Magazine, 21.
3 : Respectively, in the 2004 works 1+1 and 1=1.
4 : Dominique Moulon, Op. cit.
5 : Grégory Chatonsky. "Flußgeist, une fiction sans narration": online.
6 : Grégory Chatonsky. "Flux, entre fiction et narration": online.
7 : Grégory Chatonsky. "Flußgeist, une fiction sans narration", Op. cit.
8 : Previous works: The revolution took place in New York (2002-2003), Those that will die (2006), We not (2006) and Traces of a Conspiracy (2006) constitute, according to the artist, a preface to the 2007 series.
For a complete list of the Flußgeist works, see: incident.net/works/flussgeist/.
Pau Waelder
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