This past fall, the Société des arts technologiques (SAT), a Montreal production centre for experimentation in media arts, and artist Luc Courchesne presented Les Rendez-vous sur les bancs publics: a prototype which proposed the trial of a new, emerging mode of cultural transmission on the youth generation born with the proliferation of new technologies. Presented from August 25th to September 17th on the Contemporary Art Museum’s esplanade and in constant dialogue with the Place d’Youville in Quebec City, this interactive installation offered to spectators-participants a telematic experience between the two cities. The project was produced in collaboration with Atelier IN-SITU, Simon Piette and Sylvain Parent.
A video screen, a camera, a microphone and, of course, benches. Nothing extraordinary yet enough to displace acquired notions of the art market, its consumption of objects and the work-spectator relationship. The explosion of predetermined territories and privileges, of attitudes and expectations, time and space being called into question. What, in fact, telepresence as a communications tool emphasizes as its wager in the encounter with public art.
Direct recording and transmission of images and sounds from one space to the other (through the use of a high-speed connection), in relation to the presence of the public, the work comments on an increasingly manifest phenomena imposing itself within the art community - that of the shift away from the art object to the work as context and the artist-genius converted to the artist-mediator, exploiting the omnipresent reality of telecommunicational technologies, the emergence of networks, new modes of functioning as proposed by the Net and their impact upon our everyday lives. The installation proved to be a popular success taking into consideration the circulation and concentration of people during its run.
Here are spectators who define, by their very interventions, the work itself, which in turn is constantly transformed depending upon the mediator. Art as context with its malleable, unpredictable and improvised meaning. The constant two-step rendered possible by a simple arrangement of elements who highlight the encounter between art and desires, (our) image culture, our relations with the image, its impact upon our identities and our rapports with others.
Putting oneself on stage: a notion highly reclaimed with the appearance of domestic video cameras in the 1970’s, and the consequent democracy concerning image production, personal images, one’s world. The intimate psychological space vis-a-vis the public territory. Spectators place themselves on stage and are fascinated by their own presence on screen. The image dominates; its direct playback relating movement and sound renders these acts real, assures, reflects and literally projects their subjects into this space simultaneously social, imaginary and virtual, observing the relationship between the individual and the collective.
The screen becomes an interface of confessions and according to Philippe Quéau «loses its status as surface and has become a volume, a place: the image can be a place which one enters and lives in.» Are we so distant from alternative spaces (for example, games terrains of the Mario Bros and Lara Croft or that of teletourism) in which the body finds itself navigating in search of truths and entertainment?
The projection of self into the real mediated by a digital double and constructed within a pervasive image culture which dictates one’s identity. Taking from Virilio, Eduardo Kac advances the notion that ¨we don't inhabit or share a public space anymore...Our domain of existence or socialization is now the public image, with its volatile, functional and spectacular ubiquity that commands identity, surveillance, relationship, memory...
The negociation of the distance between the two in a virtual space without boundaries, which defines itself in time. A current reflection on distance by its own negation thanks to tele-technologies. If telepresence allows for immediate exchanges of corporal digital movements within symbolic architectures (this stated without embarking upon a discussion of architecture, its relations with virtual reality, and the consequent formal and conceptual shifts) - note that the site’s arrangement served rather to designate / frame the potential activity to be discovered - how do these contexts, their reflections upon form and the implied social gesture transform the notions of art object and accordingly engender new stakes for a culture used to consumption?
If a certain vulgarism (in the name of accessibility and comprehension) of art in its relationship to technological advancements were the issues to be explored by the project, it has also brought attention to the place that telecommunications henceforth occupies regarding art production and its effects. Citing Gerhard Stocker, in an interview conducted by Valérie Lamontagne and Pierre Robert for the online magazine Archée during Cartographies (a recent Montreal event on new media), there has been ¨a tranformation or a trangression ¨of the document to the event¨ from media art that is producing a product (which is of course no longer the art object but is production oriented) to now being more driven by network artists with people who work on the Internet where it is [now] a production of relations, or the creation of relations and relationships...Artists are dealing much more with managing relations between different communities, and between different types of users on the Internet...
If art has been conventionally characterised by the production of objects, we speak now of a ¨new art of virtual réality insofar as processes have replaced objects...An intermediary art...to provide ways of circulating between and linking what is made to be linked.(Philippe Quéau)
The liquidation of data in the era of the image-matter, impermanent and perpetual in its series of generations is possibly the cause for this displacement exposed by the information flux. Hereafter, we navigate amongst free and living circuits, sensitive to the fluctuations in the image economy and its conversions. From networked topographies, hyperbodies and the interactive flow, the notion of the object finds itself profoundly altered; its essence and dependence upon a fixed space which contextualises its value are themselves undermined by these new activities of solidarity, societal creation and group-oriented endeavours, all products of the Net. Compositions, transfers, exchanges. Interfaces, updates and alias, forms and data now live with us, for the duration of our activities. In the case of interactive tele-technologies, such as that of the dispositive used in Rendez-vous sur les bancs publics, the suppression of distance reiterates the question about the pertinence of the material aspect of the art object, accentuating the role of immediacy and the image in a virtual world. However, suffice it is to say that we continue to exist within the real, despite evident efforts to merge with the machine. ¨The virtual implies a critique of our relation to reality. The hope lies in the thought that when we leave virtual reality, we will be inevitably lead to ask: what exactly is this real environment? (Philippe Quéau)
A witness to the speculations surrounding affairs of public spaces and social relations in artistic productions and experiences, Les Rendez-vous sur les bancs publics emphasizes the stakes of our own limits of apprehension and comprehension of new potential, hybrid environments offered by these technologies which impose upon us their interpretation of the real.
The project will be reconstructed between Montreal and Paris in the spring of 2000, and between Montreal and Beyrouth in the fall of 2001.
Karen Wong
