The Liquidation project, a vast Web picture story completed in 1998 by Michel Lefebvre and Eva Quintas, inspired these two artists to pursue their creative experiment on the Web and combine with other artists to invest their respective talents in new joint adventures. What’s more, this desire for cooperation and experimentation has spread, providing other creators from the fields of literature, photography and multi-media with an opportunity to create works of photographic fiction on the Web. The five picture stories produced by the Agence Topo, in cooperation with the Société des arts technologiques, which brought its technical expertise, result from this effort and show obvious enthusiasm, a remarkable opening and a determination to explore a genre on the Web.
Carnages, designed by Mitsiko Miller and Eva Quintas, comprises several levels of text, including Alice, which can be related more directly to the picture story. Straight out of a mime show, Alice and her assistants take part in a narrative thread strongly influenced by children’s stories, to which explicit reference is made, starting with the title. This account uses a parodic style to take us without ambiguity into the world of symbolism. The adoption of such a style might surprise us at the outset, but it shows unquestionable humour, which becomes darker and more complex as the story progresses. Indeed, this story, while linear in structure, superimposes itself on an underground space which the visitor enters when he engages in the corridors it opens. The succession of pictures, actually permeated from all sides through hyperlinks, leads to a bottomless well, a journey into the dark universe of anthropophagy, building a fascinating bridge between children’s stories and the history of humankind. The interest of the two artists for cultural diversity is shown here by an incursion into cannibalism, which leads them to push their investigation still further, as the Web allows, from one universe and one register to another without distinction. From fiction, the visitor thus moves suddenly to the documentary, which proves an abyss where the desire of the other becomes consumption, ingestion, digestion and annihilation, whether in the area of eroticism or cultural or territorial appropriation. Carnages is not without making allusion, by extension, to the voracious and sometimes malicious nature of the Web, and to the immense potential for appropriation that is digital technology.
Méprise, by Lucie Duval, Joseph Lefèvre and Stanley Péan, revisits the typical sentimental plot of the picture story by turning its antiquated formula upside down. Here the idealized characters and the predictable achievement of the lovers’ perfect union are replaced with a great deal of humour by a contrasting proposal. This tragicomic universe is as much about the desire for the other as about a look into oneself through a hazardous quest. Their expression leans on the structure of the account motivated by the new possibilities offered by the Web. Indeed, the many paths suggested, the returns, the repetitions unceasingly defer the conclusion of this unpredictable, random journey, feeding the expectancy so characteristic of the amorous state. Also playing on words and the graphic narrative, the work increases the characters’ and visitors’ confusion, which by the end of the account is total, a discordant commentary on the traditional sentimental plot. Méprise leans on some phenomena very present on the Web, this universe where the individual eludes both himself and the others, redefines himself, and tries to carve a place: the glance at oneself, the search for the other, and the instability of identity on the network.
On quite another tone, Quittez, je vous prie by D. Kimm and Élène Tremblay proposes, thanks to the theme of departure, a journey within the account, corresponding, step by step and page by page, to the visitor’s Web-surfing activity. The work also relies on the medium’s intimate character while making the personal relationship proceeding from the Web experience coincide with the story ingredients. Indeed, the small dimension of the images on the screen and the choice of object-containers acting as so many metaphors of the interior, private world (bags, chest of drawers, letters, personal diary, boxes, jewel case, clothing) build an intimate universe with which one can identify as an individual. A woman leaves, and we witness the countdown, scene by scene, the vacuum created by her absence as the account progresses. The various forms taken by this relinquishment are signified by the disappearance of each page from the screen, and the vacuum finally reached corresponds to the completion of the project. The character’s dispossession finds an echo in the renouncement of this same world of objects consented to by the visitor engaged in a virtual experience. In this respect, the work is concerned by the experience of dematerialization prompted by the Web, and this, with much sensitivity.
Quant à Zocalo, by Daniel Lavoie and André Lemelin, also invites to a journey, using the same correspondence with the nature of the Web, but treating it in a completely different manner. The work creates an analogy between the discovery of a place and that of an individual. Here the travel idea makes it possible to meet and delve into the relationship established with the other. The work relies on various movement-generating processes to serve the idea of this pursuit, conveyed in a quasi-cinematographic manner. The sequences of images merging with text gradually bring the visitor closer to the coveted character, and arouse in him the desire for an even greater proximity. The second part of the work is organized like a photo album to be discovered in randomly, each captioned image adding a new aspect to the portrait and expressing part of the character. The accumulation of these images, always replaced in their context and accompanied by very personal reflections that help animate them, ends up constituting an increasingly complex living portrait of the character. The work suggests, by skilful means, that the discovery and knowledge of the other depend on the time invested in him. Moreover, the meeting at the core of this work is also that of image and text, which interact, move one toward the other, agree on an additional life, intermingle, in short, maintain a particularly symbiotic relation.
The exploration of photographic fiction carried out on the Web by Michel Lefebvre and Chuck Samuels in Une mauvaise journée
proves very different, although it also astutely takes into account the nature of its support. The photo close-ups used to relate the misadventures of this bad day build a dual relationship with the visitor. On the one hand, this image processing means a rapprochement, a very personal involvement; on the other hand, as a fragment of a situation, the close-up contributes to covering up the context, as if an unveiling to come were implied. The photographs thus orchestrate a shuttle between the search for intimacy and the remote setting, assigning to the viewer a complex position. The short statements accompanying them free the photographs from their overly immediate narrative nature, offering them a semantic opening to better carry them to a vague space that will afterwards take its full meaning. At once compact and picturesque, these verbal expressions also demand to be taken into account, resolved. This vague space allows empathy, and amusement, to settle at a distance from the mishaps reported at the beginning of the journey. In an unexpected way, the series of troubles besetting the narrator and exposed to the visitor will gradually become his own, as the navigation problems accumulate. At a dead end, the visitor will have to resort to an act of radical withdrawal to extirpate himself from the work. As indicated by the clock, the emblematic figure of the work pervading all the scenes, each visitor’s itinerary will be a matter of time. Une mauvaise journée thus casts a critical glance at the frustration generated by technology and at the multiform, and sometimes insidious, hold it has on the user.
In each of the projects created for Fixions, the guest artists managed to rise to the challenge of cooperation by producing works made up of agreements and differences between text and images, transcending the exclusive fields of literature and photography. Moreover, their work gathered here shows that they know how to take into account the medium, and the specific possibilities of this creation tool that is the Web, while taking a critical look at this new means of communication and its effects. The insight of the works, their true commitment to the new space of the Web deserve to be underlined, especially since, for several of the artists, this was their first work designed for this medium. The five photographic fictions created for the Web as part of Fixions show a great diversity, enabling us to envisage multiple avenues and a real blooming of the genre and inciting us to welcome this type of initiative.
Sylvie Parent
Translation: Jean-Pierre Fournier
This text was first published on the website of Agence Topo. We thank them for giving us the authorization to publish it again.
