Les Faits du hasard

2017.12.09 > 2018.03.04
with Arcadi, as part of Némo, international Biennial of contemporary digital arts / Paris Île-de-France

as part of the year France-Colombia 2017, with the support of the Institut Français, and as part of the Paris-Tokyo Tandem

Intentional artistic accidents and poetic re-reading of a technological society seen in the digital age are at the heart of the next central exhibition of the international Biennial of digital art at the CENTQUATRE-PARIS, Les Faits du hasard. A way for Man to resume control over the machine?

The international Biennial of digital arts of Île-de-France, heir of the Némo festival, will return to its nerve centre of the CENTQUATRE for its second edition (December 2017 – March 2018) on the occasion of its big thematic and transversal exhibition: Les Faits du hasard.

Like for the two previous exhibitions, the artistic direction is co-signed by Gilles Alvarez, director of the Biennial and the event coordination of Arcadi, and José-Manuel Gonçalvès, director of the CENTQUATRE. A token of continuity for a programme that will once again inscribe itself in the large artistic mechanism of chance, the accidental and serendipity that was opened two years ago by the exhibition Prosopopées : quand les objets prennent vie. “Before, chance in art was error”, declared Gilles Alvarez. “But ever since Marcel Duchamp and quantum mechanics, there is an intentional chance, a tool that is asking to be organised by an artistic gesture.”

In this new exploration of the relationship between Man and machine, where the technological process collides with an often capricious artistic equation, several installations will testify of the convoluted creative steps, going through a multiplicity of supports, such as Quentin Euverte’s Buzz Aldrin Syndrom, in which analog material, digital data, chemical processes and live cinema screenings participate in an unpredictable result, with the appearance of an exquisite corpse game. For José-Manuel Gonçalvès, the idea is to “build a contemporary art exhibition that draws from all forms of aesthetics, in digital technology, in the theatre of objects, and that plays with the variety of chance to show that the result of an artwork isn’t always replicable”. You can therefore expect surprises when you will project yourself into the body of another, using a headset (the body sway experience of The Machine to Be Another of the BeAnotherLab collective) or when you will observe the pixelated choreographies of augmented snails by Cyril Leclerc and Elizabeth Saint-Jalmes (Le Pixel lent).

The exhibition Les Faits du hasard will not however be settled as much in technological absurdity as Prosopopées. It will look for a more poetic and contemplative reading of our technological society through a digital filter. “Chance is the contrary of what we believe digital art is, as we think it brings us to total control, to perfection”, José-Manuel Gonçalvès sums up. “But maybe the greatest perfection is actually the things that are not completely perfect?”. Human, did you say human?