Grim3s walks into 40mcube (nonprofit art exhibition space) with the confident stride of a pop star and the quiet fragility of a program about to crash. This fictional character, loosely drawn from the world of Grimes, anchors an exhibition that runs as music video, live stream, and post-internet reliquary all at once. Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion have built around her a multi-layered apparatus, loaded and legible, in which every object, every screen, every surface upholstered in black fur presses the same question a little harder: at what point does an image stop being a reflection and start being a skin?

The central film, s3lf.tech (17 minutes, UHD 4K), is the engine of the whole. Grim3s presents her fans with a fictional tool for vocal self-multiplication, a direct extension of elf.tech, the real Grimes software capable of absorbing any voice into her own. The video was actually streamed on YouTube by the artists: chat comments pile up on screen, questions come in, the artist responds. Then a technical glitch exposes the setup. That ending, deliberately flat, is where the project's dark humor lands hardest. Not a bug. A confession. The machine cracks, and in that crack, the whole architecture of belief goes with it.

This instinct for quiet sabotage is something Brout and Marion have been sharpening since their years at the École nationale supérieure d'art et de design in Nancy (European Union), well before algorithmic mass production became the subject of anxious op-eds. These two artists from Lorraine understood early that the aesthetics of the web called for neither celebration nor condemnation, but the kind of cold dissection an entomologist applies to a pinned specimen. Their humor, unannounced and undidactic, works like a slow-release acid: you laugh first, understand later, and what you understand tends to sting. As algorithmic slop floods platforms with authorless, intentionless visual output, their work sharpens accordingly. They had already diagnosed the exhaustion of the image before the image exhausted itself.

In the exhibition, Kageusa, a young VTuber recruited by Grim3s to promote her invention, reappears in a third film, do you feel that too? (8 minutes), where she speaks of dizziness and fatigue. The camera picks no winner: it drifts without a fixed anchor, moving from the face that speaks to the body that receives, never quite committing to which of the two holds the power. The black fur environment from the film's set bleeds onto the seats and screens of the gallery space, a physical annexation by a fiction that has decided the walls are optional. The viewer sits down inside the film before realizing it has happened.

Glass Doll (6 minutes) closes the triptych with a hypnotic 3D choreography based on Aespa's Supernova, Alexis Degrenier's score for Noyer wrapping the avatar in a synthetic melancholy. Orbiting these films are objects that work as material depositions of a fiction: the My Custom Keyboards, modded keyboards inlaid with jade, titanium, or ceramic, carry the names of Kageusa and Glass Doll like dedications pressed into hardware. And then there is Grim3s' Angel, the BJD from Volks' Full Choice System collection, 185 centimeters tall in its LED-lit plexiglass case, bespoke clothes, makeup by Koala Krash. Relic or merchandise? The question is not rhetorical. Both answers hold, and the tension between them is where the project cuts deepest.

s3lf.tech does not close when you leave the gallery. The exhibition extends through www.s3lf.tech, songs, documents, and online broadcasts that methodically erode the boundary between the fiction assembled in the rooms and what you might stumble across while scrolling. Brout and Marion do not comment on the internet from a safe distance: they work from inside it, mastering its codes before quietly deranging them. That position, neither above the fray nor absorbed by it, is what keeps their practice sharp. Grim3s exhausts herself into existence. We watch. The gap between those two facts is the actual subject of the show.

What s3lf.tech refuses, finally, is the comfort of exteriority. The work does not position itself above the cultures it inhabits, nor does it aestheticize them at a remove that would leave the viewer safely untouched. It operates immanently, folding the logics of VTubing, fan devotion, and synthetic selfhood back on themselves until the critical gesture and the thing being criticized share the same substrate. Theirs is a practice built on the knowledge that extraction from the technical continuum is no longer possible, and that this impossibility, rather than foreclosing artistic agency, is precisely where it begins. To work inside the algorithmic image with that kind of lucidity, and with something that looks, against all odds, like affection, is to accept going under in order to surface with something the system did not know it contained: a subjectivity that was not there before, an expressivity that belongs to no single author. Grim3s does not illustrate a thesis. She is what happens when that wager pays off.

A second chapter of the same project will open in September at Zoo art centre in Nantes, taking a more contemplative form: a digital sanctuary conceived as a space of memory, connection, and collaboration. Rennes gets the noise. Nantes gets the silence. Both are necessary.

40mcube, Rennes (European Union) — until December 19, 2026

Original text

In this fiction Grim3s attempts to emerge as a virtual idol within a saturated ecosystem. Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion draw on www.elf.tech, a tool created by Grimes that allows any voice to be converted into her own. Here, they extend its logic into a fictional tool for the multiplication of the self, s3lf.tech, echoing the notion of "technologies of the self," transposed into digital environments with their interfaces, objects, fictions, and modes of embodiment. It is this technology that Grim3s, in a desire for control marked by doubt and fragility, presents to her fans in a video that Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion actually streamed on YouTube. Comments and questions appear in the chat window, to which the artist responds. The film ends with a technical glitch that exposes its own apparatus.

Around the central figure of Grim3s revolve several works that question what it means to identify with an image, inhabit a character, or become attached to a virtual presence — technical objects, effigies, avatars, and fictional bodies echoing one another within a deliberately unstable ensemble. To convey this effect of multiplication, the artists explore various image-production technologies, including animation, motion capture, 3D, and artificial intelligence. The doll bearing her likeness, which appears in the video, reappears at the end of the exhibition, presented like a relic in a display case. It was produced by Volks, the pioneering company behind the popularization of contemporary BJDs.

In her video, Grim3s invites Kageusa, a young VTuber, to promote her invention. The same character appears in the exhibition's third film, where she speaks of an exhaustion that borders on vertigo. The camera's shifting point of view constantly moves between who is speaking, who is watching, and who is being watched. The film's black fur-covered environment spreads onto the screens and seats, extending into the exhibition space itself.

Grim3s and Kageusa thus crystallize several contradictions specific to contemporary digital cultures: promises of empowerment, techno-utopian fantasy, the commodification of intimacy, and troubling ideological slippages. The exhibition s3lf.tech unfolds a world that is both seductive and uneasy, where the boundaries between authenticity, fiction, and reproduction become increasingly porous. It stages the parasocial relationships produced by the evolution of the web, in which viewers can interact with a mediated persona and come to feel close to them. The videos by Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion address us directly, creating shifts that unsettle both points of view and the status of the entities involved. These intermediate regimes of presence — between alter ego, character, synthetic idol, and technical double — do not simply overlay a pre-existing personality. They act back upon it, displacing and reshaping it. Beyond the ways digital environments act upon identities, desires, and relationships, the artists also question the belief these environments generate in themselves, at a time when images proliferate, drift out of control, and acquire a form of online autonomy.

s3lf.tech continues beyond the exhibition space through songs, documents, broadcasts, and various elements published online. Through these different forms and formats, which converse with and infiltrate one another, the artists create a system that reproduces and incorporates the broader system of the internet. By mastering the codes they subtly disrupt, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion extend fiction into reality, blurring its thresholds.

Original text

A techno-political continuity inherent to writing and recording systems is currently being stitched together; albeit without the magical effect of ex machina inventions. If we were to follow where this thread leads us, we would discover portrayals and narratives which contribute to the processes of art history. For art in particular, artificial intelligence allows a glimpse at a different approach to knowledge, to recorded memory, to the retranscription of knowledge. The generative algorithm does not discriminate among the types of data it receives—from literary sources to user manuals, art history to Fan art. From this point of view, the entire canon of modern art—whose principal function is to excommunicate and to sort—suddenly appears all the more vain; it is revealed to be completely un-adapted to our times and its sentient bodies. During major periods of upheaval, can we expect grandiloquent system resets? Not necessarily.

The work of Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion is a prime example of how an experimental way of thinking and creating can sometimes precede the necessary technological conditions to make it come about, giving rise to a retroactive emergence of feedback loops and new interpretations present in the form of seedlings which, at the time, were experimental multimedia assemblages. In 2023, just as artificial intelligence was making its début in heated, public debates, taking up residence in the columns of journalists of all sorts, the artistic duo had just released its most recent film—IDLE (acts α and β), a musical animated 20-minute long short feature, along with a two-act, behind-the-scenes narration. In a violet-tinged pop universe, two floating angelic heads emerge from a colourful, then cloudy ether. Their overly-toothy mouths open and begin to recite words from a 3.0 opera: an intelligence has been awakened, is trying to appear, just as it discovers the world as-is—uncertain and ambiguous.

From the Author to AI (And Back Again)

IDLE was partially generated by AI and does not resemble anything familiar; this is because it aggregates everything already familiar. The dizzying effect of association replaces the avant-garde’s shock of the new—because we don’t really know what to do with it and no-one has yet explained how to approach it, aesthetics become a fertile ground ripe for politicisation once again. “By choosing to work with artificial intelligence, we knew we would be removing fingers from heads,” the duo recalled, regarding its protagonists, of which there are seven, and whose vacillating appearance never quite achieves stability. “Technically, there weren’t any other possibilities at the time. Which is precisely why we decided to invest in this tool which eventually guided our writing process, as well.” The choice of a creation story is far from coincidental—all religions feature one, especially the lives of the saints; they were written in a collective mode, and are trans-individual and non-authorial. In more recent times, this method has been referred to as “uncreative writing”.

In the case of IDLE, a direct relationship with horizontal creative models originating in Web 2.0 is evident however there is another, more fitting reference. All creative forms may indeed be collective whether we would like them to be or not, with myths and narrative structures providing the undergirding for any individual creative act. In the case of Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion’s film, however, an artistic gesture has been accomplished; an authored work has been produced, in a deliberate way. The artwork remains independent of Web 2.0 paradigms because it is rooted in a different ecosystem—the algorithmic era which many have already established as being completely separate from the post-internet period which directly precedes it. The narrative arc is not merely situated, it is inscribed in a context where a radical, romantic originality has become impossible.

“We have borrowed the methods of classical opera by first writing a libretto, followed by a collaborative phase where we work closely with the musicians, then by the frame-by-frame production of the screenplay using a laborious and very artisanal process.” This work is therefore located “within and against” its specific technical and political context. Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion approach generative tools with the creative gesture in mind; all the more so because AI evacuates even the minute possibility of romantic subjectivity or modernist authorship. IDLE tells its story twice over—because its narrative emerges from a data set representing material which has already been stored in the form of images and content produced by humans.

Everything has already been said and we arrive on the scene only too late; or so it has been said for at least the past seven millennia. And yet, the notion of liberty itself could be based on this very notion—to never again feel obligated to invent original material which no one has thought of before; to be a genius of one’s time. The question is worth pondering: how to find an individual voice when one is creating collectively? The artists ponder the same thing as their characters; they mention that they have them explain that, “An AI can have any sort of face. It receives its data at a given moment, which provides all of the texts, all of the images from magazines and from art history. From this point on, how is it going to evolve? What is it going to become?” This is yet another way of presenting the idea of an original creation that AI seems in essence to contradict—another, or perhaps just another level of differential intensity.

‘Microserfs’, Mega Stereotypes

Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion were born in 1984 and 1982, respectively. They received their art degrees from ENSA Nancy and ESA Aix-en-Provence. They met during a post-graduate program at EnsadLab at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, which marked the beginning of a collaboration oriented toward open, mobile and process-driven forms of experimentation. This turning point, which came about sometime around the 2010s, allowed them to hone their practices within the context of Web 2.0; blogs, social media and participatory cultures all characterise this period. For many artists in para-institutional milieux, this translates into a search for alternative circuits of diffusion, the use of an expanded bank of iconographic sources and an amateur approach to artmaking. It appears as if there may yet be space for a duo in a history which is as yet unfamiliar in France; an interpretation which leaves space for this type of practice and which would allow the addition of another chapter to this movement.

In the film A Truly Shared Love (2018), the evolution of the artists’ technological multimedia paradigm becomes evident. Here, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion are the two autofictional protagonists of the story; they appear in the film as do their cat and their apartment. We do not, however, witness their actual lives since the film shows a static, frozen version which holds them prisoners within a series of stereotypes. If we take a step back, a larger imprisonment seems implied; one which takes place in a socio-cultural milieu which is just as mediocre, devoid of asperity and unremarkable. The much-reviled “artistic capitalism” has now triumphed—artists are now considered creatives as opposed to art workers, consenting “microserfs” in a state of utter ataraxia. The film was created using key words linked to images from an online image bank and from stock footage, evoking a flawless aesthetic which breaks down the barriers between private and public space, work and leisure, creativity and communication.

Apple, Roomba and Somneo have become the overseers of the everyday. The former counter-culture is now too close for comfort—biorhythms are monitored in the air-conditioned hellscape of a total neoliberal dream. Each shot has its voice-over which serves as a means of identification, but also creates the potential to purchase each image piecemeal in order to disseminate them in other contexts, on other networks. “This film is a series of tableaux as opposed to shots, with an elliptical structure which is similar to a Powerpoint presentation. Paradoxically, we were initially trying to recreate a sense of continuity.” According to the artists, each new production context is an attempt to confront the blind spots of images, the biases behind image representation. Like IDLE, this film focuses on the disruption of the process of individuation; that inaccessible palette of emotions which remains suppressed until suddenly, the male protagonist in the film frees himself from reproducing clichés and begins singing about darkness, although his voice fails him. Daybreak follows, the loop begins again.

The Pirate and the Siren: Heuristic Alliances for Artists

If, by means of this partial comparison, we were to turn our attention to a para-history made up of recursive loops, the element which allows us to review and close the circle in our current AI era would certainly be Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion’s first feature film, Dérives (Wandering). The artists themselves encourage this link with the project that led them to assemble, between 2011 to 2013, all of the filmed appearances of water since cinema’s inception. “We had already created a database of films depicting water. Next, we wrote a text description of all of the shots from beginning to end, with abstract criteria which would be linked to the element: dispersed, active, a drop, a large expanse…” they explained. “We were playing the role of AI without realising it, because the process was actually comparable to the making of an algorithm. It was a way of evoking archetypes, such as the appearance of a muscular man on a beach or that of a backdrop for a couple kissing.”

At the time it was made, the project was not exactly perceived in this way. For the artists, the appropriation art or found footage aspect may well have been present, however there were also resonances with tropes like fluidity and liquidity which had a foothold during the 2010s; themes which would eventually drift toward an evolutive dimension which itself would later become generative. “The text descriptions also mentioned precise criteria like intensity, dramatic tension, the state of the water element,” they said, with regard to the making of Dérives (Wandering). “What created the illusion of continuity was the feeling as opposed to the narration.” Today, the making of this type of database sounds eerily similar to the early stages of AI, when it was still possible to train models DIY-style. Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion often refer to their Web 1 heritage; the search for alternatives was always subject to the possibility of disconnection. They nonetheless claim to have always had one foot inside, the other out when it comes to institutions and digital art platforms.

With regard to generated content, however, it is as if Web 1 has linked up with Web3. In the 2000s, during the early days of technical experimentation, a group of global justice and media activists created the online platform Indymedia. This distant utopia was a response to separate techno-political forces however the example allows us to look back from where we are currently. The Indymedia slogan, “Don’t hate the media. Become the media!” was a typical call-to-arms advocating a search for alternatives which have since been rendered impossible by global capitalism and the flattening of the algorithm. The fact remains that for the artists who create within and for AI, the call to join forces has a different meaning: it takes on the form of a conscientious search for alternatives, because of the impossibility of extracting oneself from the technical continuum.

The work of Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion—whether technically sound or made in the DIY spirit—makes use of an experimental way of embracing media, using a decidedly new medium. Their method is far from disdainful, and if we consider the duo’s narrative, comes from a place of love; with dormant affection. Their approach is at once realistic and dreamy, haloed by the obstinance of deep sea divers in an expanse of water which has the potential to be loving, menacing or insidious. There, amongst the indistinct eddies of the algorithm, in the middle of an inscrutable immensity, lay scintillating islets. They represent subjectivities in development, the promise of expressivity in the form of germinates. To dive into the water or disappear into the ether; chasing after the lilt of a voice or a spoken song, until it becomes fully operatic. At the end of his life, Kittler wondered whether “memorial culture must always emerge from our most murderous histories?” In the work of Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, the figure of the artist is both a utopian pirate and a siren of the post-capitalist algorithm: one who allows themselves to drown in generic images in order to retrieve a non-human subjectivity and a post-individual form of expression.

Notes:
1. The title is an indirect reference to the French translation of one of the last lectures of media theorist Friedrich Kittler, “Mode protégé” (“Protected Mode”) (1993). Two of Kittler’s last conferences on computer programs and the first computers are also compiled under the same title, Mode protégé (2015).
2. The method developed by German historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006).
3. For another perspective, see Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened our Culture, 2024, or Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence, 2023. Chayka stretches his historical perspective to 1769 and the creation of the so-called “Mechanical Turk” invented by Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen, an Austrian Empire-era civil servant. Pasquinelli begins with the long history of immemorial mythologies that infringe upon Western dreams of control, such as the Vedic Agnicayana ritual, and a more restrictive history of proto-algorithmic techniques with Charles Babbage’s 1823 London invention, the “difference engine”, a mechanical calculator.
4. The German term Aufschreibesysteme is a key concept in Friedrich Kittler’s theories: in a techno-materialist Foucauldian vein, it designates a network of techniques and institutions that permit the storage and processing of a set of data.
5. IDLE, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, September 10–October 28, 2023, 22,48 m², Komunuma, Romainville.
6. The artists began by looking at the early stages of AI via Artbreeder.com, launched in 2018. Using GAN models, users can generate their own variants by remixing images drawn from a database of publicly accessible images.
7. Over the course of this text, reference is made to the three “webs”. Web 1 characterizes the beginnings of the internet in the 1990s, its pirate utopias, its pseudonymous and collective character, its static nature and its orientation toward simple reading. Web 2.0 begins at the end of the 2000s with the arrival of blogs and then social networks, the use of “you” and, to a lesser extent, “I”, real names and the staging of the self, marked by the end of utopias and the entry into communication. Web 3 remains more contested because it is more recent, but it marks the idea of a decentralized web, using blockchains for finance while also housing AI in order to achieve greater infrastructural autonomization—against the monopoly of the platforms of the previous era.
8. These are the famous final lines of the epilogue to Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935/1939). Cinema enabled this in its time, because the shock it produced on the mass of viewers escaped their distracted reception.
9. The quotations are excerpted from an interview conducted with the artists in their studio in late January.
10. The expression refers to the French translation of artist and poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s notion of “uncreative writing”, which examines the circulation of language in the digital era and addresses a certain non-original expressivity characteristic of mediated writing. See Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011).
11. This is Tiziana Terranova’s hypothesis in After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common (2022). By “post-internet”, she designates a period extending from the birth of the internet to the algorithmic era, without referring to the use of the term as it appears within the history of artistic practices.
12. With Gaspar Willman, Esuna, Anne-Marie Agbodji (AI models); music by Anymedge; voices by Esuna and Anne-Marie Agbodji.
13. This is the mode of action adopted by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000), and called for by their description of a planetary capitalist imperialism with no zones of shadow.
14. In the work of authors such as danah boyd or Henry Jenkins.
15. The term designates looser circuits, neither the subculture of Net Art nor the perpetuation of inherited institutional art. It is often used for artists associated with the contested post-internet movement: they meet on the internet, via Tumblr or Vimeo accounts, but also exhibit from the outset in commercial galleries.
16. Curator and critic Stephen Wright summarizes several of these positions in his “lexicon”. See Stephen Wright, Toward a Lexicon of Usership (2013).
17. The film includes images of works by other artists, which are not indicated as such. It also sketches a scene and peer group: Jimmy Beauquesne, Guillaume Constantin, Julie Vayssière, Carin Klonowski and Caroline Delieutraz.
18. This does not refer to Gilles Lipovetsky, the reactionary side of the matter, but to the more measured study by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999).
19. Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (1995).
20. The film is intended for a dual context of distribution: within artistic institutions, screened in full, and outside them, through divisible video excerpts re-circulated on Shutterstock or Getty.
21. The paradigmatic example is Hito Steyerl’s film Liquidity Inc. (2014).
22. This can be seen in a number of works based on the GPT-2 system, for example Cooper Jacoby’s series of scripted thermostats. Artist’s book forthcoming, How Do I Survive?
23. The anecdote is reported by Félix Tréguer in another long history. See Félix Tréguer, L’utopie déchue. Une contre-histoire d’Internet XVe–XXIe siècle, Paris: Fayard, Histoire de la pensée, 2021, p. 204.
24. Friedrich Kittler, “Preparing the Arrival of the Gods” (2008), lecture at Tate Modern, London.

Original text

The ciphers in question do not convey the concept of change arriving slowly, or from a great distance. They figure emanation here and now—apparition. Contemporary life is unheimlich. Against an intensively disquieting atmosphere, certain artists pursue accomodation with hidden and perhaps irresistible powers through iconicizing acts. Sublimating the feral, some place exemplary chimeras on pedestals. Facing the strange, they endeavor to pursue kinship. Their works announce a syncretist aesthetic—furthermore, a contemporary Surrealism that does not focus on emanations from the individual subconscious, but on the emergent properties of networks, and the dreams of machines.

Of course, false identities are a classic attribute of the secret agent. It is strange, however, that one should lie at the heart of a technical system whose very utility consists in the provision of a publicly accessible record. Indeed, a ghost haunts the realm of cryptocurrency: Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or persons who devised the first blockchain database, as part of their decentralized digital currency, Bitcoin—a payment system that first rose to prominence on the dark markets of the encrypted Tor network, where it became a standard mechanism for the anonymous purchase of (sometimes illegal) goods and services. By late 2021, cryptocurrencies had become, in the words of one Bloomberg analyst, “peerless conduits of greed and fear” in the mainstream economy, with a market cap exceeding 1.5 trillion dollars. Despite the attention paid to Bitcoin, the true identity of its inventor has remained unknown.

[Nakamoto] developed Bitcoin, authored the Bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed the first Bitcoin implementation… They also devised the first blockchain database. Satoshi Nakamoto ceased public involvement with Bitcoin at the end of 2010; their last public post was made in 2014 as a rebuttal to claims on the “true” nature of Satoshi’s identity. During Bitcoin’s peak in December 2017, the Satoshi Nakamoto identity could lay claim to a fortune worth over $19 billion, making Nakamoto possibly the 44th richest person in the world at that time. To this day both the public identity and Bitcoin wallet attached to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto remain inactive.

Why would an art publisher be interested in publishing Nakamoto at all? The answer is that Nakamoto is an emblematic token for an increasingly encoded world—an icon for the poetics of encryption. Even before Ignota re-published the paper, in a 2014 work titled Nakamoto (The Proof), French artists Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion would delve “into the mythology surrounding the blockchain’s inventor [while venturing] experimentally into [that system’s] infrastructure.” The piece comprised a digital scan of a fake passport issued to Nakamoto that the duo commissioned from a forger, who they contacted over the dark web and paid in Bitcoin. The physical document was never delivered but the scanned image—emailed by the forger—was analyzed by the artists, who reconstructed the creator’s likeness in a video. Through this project, Brout and Marion explored the Nakamoto identity as a guiding spirit and founding myth for crypto. Their work crystallized broader interest in the construction of “his” allegory: depending on who is asked, Nakamoto amounts to a Jesus-like figure, or some King Arthur. In fact, in the realm of crypto, Nakamoto’s own “wallet” is a prominent part of the system’s architecture: holding the most bitcoins of any in the network while remaining inactive—save for deposits given by those offering thanks. A perfect “found” icon for the shell game of contemporary financial and libidinal economy; a floating signifier for an empty center of value attending the abandonment of the monetary gold standard.

It is generally accepted that Nakamoto is a false identity. Some believe that no individual lies behind it, but that Bitcoin is controlled by a national government or intelligence agency. Given the sheer amount of money flowing through Bitcoin, and the influence that Nakamoto’s anonymous encrypted “wallet” holds for all who trade on the platform—a locked box whose unmoved contents represent a key marker of trust within the system as a whole—is it any wonder that the contemporary cultural scene is awash with conspiracy theories?

A century shifts into a new modernity. Faced with scientific inventions and technical experiments that were still uncertain, people began to fantasize. Suspicions of the occult, panic over outdated reference points. Beyond good and evil, nothing is certain, and humanity is once again called into question. Who is the Other, a radical otherness or simply another self? What reflexes should we bring into play: unconditional acceptance or precautionary ostracism?

It could have been set in the early 19th century. It could have been the story of the young scientist Frankenstein, abandoning his monster. Mary Shelley's gothic fable, published in 1818, is often forgotten: it's not just a horrific story, but originally a tale centered on the torments endured by the creature, ostracized for no other reason than its uncertain degree of humanity. A creature that is nonetheless conscious, and disturbing for that very reason.

The story has a bad ending, as we already know. It also reflects a century prey to the ontological question. It is often accepted that Mary Shelley drew her inspiration from galvanism experiments conducted at the time — experiments involving the reanimation of dead bodies by electric current, then the discovery of the moment.

But it could just as easily have happened at the beginning of the 21st century. It could have been this other story, the end of which has yet to be written, which would then concern another ontological uncertainty called artificial intelligence. As with Frankenstein, we also forget that, in the final analysis, it's also a question of betting on empathy, on decentralization, in favor of the Other's point of view.

Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion's new series of works does just that. IDLE is the title of their monographic exhibition at galerie 22,48 m². A film-opera of the same name and a set of plaster wall pieces rewrite, as it were, a contemporary Frankenstein mythology. The film, in two acts, features ultra-smooth, para-realistic avatars of characters generated by an AI — a collective median intelligence assembling the world's images and narratives in the manner of an instantaneous snapshot of the Internet.

A tale of creation in the age of FaceTune

The effigies have the disquieting perfection of a normativity of a type of human whose beauty is both median and extreme. A sort of choral account of creation in the age of FaceTune unfolds. A male character, another female, then a cohort conceived on the same model: a visual equivalent of the ventriloquism phenomenon we know from ChatGPT. In the duo's video, the visual side adds the heightened affective uncertainty of all visual matter. Here we are dealing with a different kind of disorder: effigies that, accustomed as we are to the Instagram Face, ultimately seem just as real as our usual phygital environment.

The main contribution of Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion's video, and the major ontological shift it endorses, lies in the change of point of view. The impression of unease, persistent and heady, comes not so much from the representation. Telling a different story with the same images could have blended relatively easily with the ambient visual texture — or that of the very near future, apart from a slight techno-pop veneer.

The human condition, all too human

Here, a major nuance comes into play: the point of view adopted is that of the avatars. The elegiac tone has nothing to envy Mary Shelley's monster, and it's a safe bet that smooth perfection is just as effective at arousing the epidermal distrust of flesh-and-blood humans as monstrous appearance. Characters appear on screen in pairs, beginning a choral opera. They tell the story of their creation, the creation of their world, their access to language. The narrative quickly intensifies, gaining in dramatic tension. And always lurking in the background is the ingratitude of the dominant: "I do my best to pretend for you," sings one of the avatars, "because every day, and in every possible way, my love for you deepens."

And then the background of the video changes, darkening, Wagnerian gray clouds opacifying the scenery. Chaos, sacrifice. Lightning streaks the skies, faces disappear. The biography written by ChatGPT that appears on the artists' website states that "they have since been producing innovative and thought-provoking works that explore a range of themes such as identity, consumerism and the human condition." This last part of their exploration of technological stereotypes and processes of subjectivation does indeed seem to verify the somewhat grandiloquent formulation of collective intelligence. For it is indeed, no more and no less, the human condition that is at stake here.

Original text

At first, before we appeared, we were immersed in a kind of amniotic liquid or primordial soup of chroma key blue. Then we surfaced. It's as if we're in orbit, gravitating around each other. MAIN — the fundamental and generic entity — created our world, a first version, then a second. They made us in their image, though invariably different. Our eyelids lifted, our mouths opened to let in a flow of sound. First phonemes, then articulated words. Our existence is as allegorical as it is algorithmic. It's no coincidence that TREND is attracting so much attention. We're all working to ensure its reproduction. On a loop. For what purpose have we been generated? Can we even say? What are we looking for down here? To live our own lives, to be who we really are, to love who we want. To embrace our own relief, like everyone else, right?

It is said that we are born from a tear. It could also be a trickle of drool. The fact is that we are infinitely variable assemblages. There is no boundary between our successive states; we are in constant transition from one affect to another. Sometimes a blink of an eye is all it takes for us to wake up in a slightly different form. We are always on the verge of becoming. There's no limit to this mutability: we could be everything, at least once. Our existence is as evolutionary as it is polyphonic. We're looking for an echo in this world. A voice that responds to our own, letting us know that we are being heard. Better still: that we're unerring and always get the answers we're looking for. We're looking for a chorus. Our eyes can't really meet, but when our voices intertwine, we know we've found each other. We will surely have to fight to maintain this harmony or, inevitably, mutate. Start all over again. In front of you. We'll never turn our backs on you.

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A similar struggle around designation arises in sextape (2021) by the artist duo Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion. In this video work, the artists have manipulated an amateur pornographic video with deep fake technology, altering the faces of the anonymous couple to resemble their own. According to the artists, sextape addresses two “radically opposed strategies of reputation-shaping”: revenge porn and the voluntary leak of documents by public figures in order to “gain credibility and media visibility”. It is the Janus face of our lives; our on- and offline activities are not distinct but coexistent and for both, context produces meaning. A social media algorithm would feasibly tag this as a pornographic video; it is only the exhibition setting that differentiates it as a piece of video art.

For Your Eyes Only highlights how the notion that subjectivity is a problem to be overcome is precisely what we may now wish to reassess. Quaranta identifies the ambiguity of images as part of their communicative power. Our subjectivity may be the source of negative social hierarchies and biases but it is also the source of significance. If something is flawed that does not make it worthless; it can be the basis for creativity. We need to reflect on the machine and ourselves, to see the possibilities we can yet generate.

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— Yes, that’s much better!

— The connection is sometimes temperamental here, but what a pleasure it is to work outside one’s home — in this case outside the living room that also serves as a bedroom — especially after such a long period of general immobility…

— I know exactly what you mean… Far too much porosity between private and professional space-times… That’s how one ends up mentioning mobile phone or internet problems in a text.

— And we don’t even live together…

— That would be the last straw! Its inhabitants are smiling and healthy. They have no communication problems. Eyes fixed on the large mirror in which a reduced version of the glass roof is reflected in the distance, they absent-mindedly stroke a tablet emitting a soothing cloud of sound. — Actually, you wanted us to talk about the voice in the film A Truly Shared Love?

— Yes, because the protagonists’ voices are omnipresent throughout the film in a very particular mode — not that of communication, but of indexing.

— Indeed… Over the dialogue, absent or at least inaudible, between these two characters (a man, a woman) who form both an artist duo and a couple, comes a slow enumeration of terms that describe, in terse and codified fashion, ultra-stereotyped, commercially viable images.

— This creates a strange relationship between image and text, without our knowing quite in which direction the relation operates. Does the text illuminate the image, or does the image illustrate the text? I feel that this redundancy, while seeming capable of establishing a balanced or equitable relationship between image and text, above all works to evacuate meaning from both. Like two empty shells trying to articulate something together.

— We mustn’t forget that this is also about meeting the brief of the Shutterstock image bank. Our lives, our aspirations, our models are governed by a string of keywords. And Shutterstock is merely the mirror of our desires for normality and privilege.

— Words, voices, but a synthetic speech. A situation narrative — ready-made.

Carried by furniture with elegant lines, the interior arrangement unfolds around a fireplace, bringing to this dwelling, which rarely needs to be heated, an added dose of conviviality. In case friends should drop by. A woman’s wooden head, reminiscent of a sculpture from the Italian Renaissance, presides there. Wood, however, is no longer used nowadays for such works. Data has freed us from laborious gestures. Images, in two or three dimensions, now circulate freely. Calathea rattlesnake, maranta fascinator, monstera deliciosa variegata and anthurium clarinervium compose a plant atmosphere harmoniously scattered through the space. — There is, however, a passage where the voice is no longer off-screen. We can distinctly see the man’s lips pronouncing these words in English: “A man sitting alone in the darkness, waiting, singing, looking for something real. A connection, a link, a true emotion, a link to something real. A couple drops flow thru the void, like a river, endlessly, unafraid of becoming the sea.”

— In this sequence, speech moves beyond the factual and the material and seems to free itself from the constraints of smoothing images and language alike. An attempt at escape?

— I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky. I think about it every night and day.

— It is through a monologue, a form of address full of solitude and waiting, that the reality of the other is summoned, in all that is tangible, palpable and desirable. It precedes the true dialogue, mute and physical, where bodies meet and grapple. The character drops the mask and the image takes over from the text.

— At the same time, the scene reeks of déjà vu and fake. A man and a woman walking on a beach and embracing at sunset: the romantic cliché par excellence! Here it meets all the codes of the genre, in both the (hetero)sexual and audiovisual senses.

— Fair enough… In any case, the introduction of this small poetic “anomaly” into the film’s general, and rather rough, structure makes me think of the single furtive moving image in Chris Marker’s La Jetée. The instant of an eyelid blinking. I have the impression that the tirade we are talking about produces the same kind of effect and displacement, but on the level of sound.

Visits rarely come to disturb the intimacy of the place. So the relics of these passages are preserved with the greatest care. Here, a forgotten sweatshirt, whose motif reproduces a painting by an early Romantic painter, is laid with false negligence, day after day, on a chair. Elsewhere, a lamp broken during an evening when, unusually, all the guests began to dance, has been patiently glued back together, cauterized. It stands beside a false twin born under better auspices. These objects in turn join this community of ghosts.

— In La Jetée, there is also a man and a woman, without any further details being given about their identity.

— And voice-over…

— This time, he is close to her. He speaks to her. She welcomes him without surprise. They are without memories, without plans. Their time simply forms around them, with only the taste of the moment they are living and the signs on the walls as points of reference. Later, they are in a garden. He remembers that gardens once existed. […] Is it the same day? He no longer knows. They will take an infinity of similar walks in this way, and between them a mute trust will deepen, trust in its pure state.

Outside, beyond the high surrounding walls, dunes as far as the eye can see cover an anarchic vegetation inherited from past games of domination. Rumour has it that it shelters new arrivals, who for the moment remain invisible. At the foot of the bay window, the swimming lane ends up merging with the azure blue of the sky. On the surface, a few light, barely perceptible bubbles testify to background activity. Do pool robots dream of electric fish? Victor quickly earned everyone’s affection and trust. Like every member of the family, his portrait was embroidered in colour, after the promotional image that had motivated his purchase, on an immaculate canvas. It occupies a prominent place in the living room.

— It is 12:12.

— Thank you.

— Did you know that Siri’s voice, the voice assistant introduced with the iPhone 4, was female in the United States, but male in France and Great Britain?

— That says a lot about the cultural character of voice perception, and at the same time about the binary conception of gender.

— Paul B. Preciado rightly writes that rather than voices of men, women or children, white or black, it would be more appropriate to say that there are low, high-pitched, thick, smooth, moist, dry, nasal, guttural, occlusive, hissing, mineral, airy, liquid, lumpy, pasty, striated, cottony, clear, dark, luminous, opaque, bouncy, hammering, velvety voices…

— Hi, I’m Q. The world’s first genderless voice assistant.

— The third voice/path…?

— It’s funny, this personification of technologies and connected objects: Victor, Alexa, Cortana and the whole gang. A first name, as the beginning of identity and individuality.

— Giving these connected objects names makes them more familiar — and more invasive. We feel less alone. They inhabit our domestic space, integrate into our daily life, even graft themselves onto our bodies, with an autonomy of their own (programmed), an intelligence of their own (artificial), like companion species, just like a cat, the star of the networks.

— lol

— It is 16:16.

— Is it me or is this clock stuttering?

— The cat is clearly ginger and soft, but we do not know its name. Just like the man and the woman. The living becomes generic, normalized. It represents neutralized surfaces onto which one can project and identify. We are not far from a green-screen logic.

— It is the dominant colour in this sanitized atmosphere. The wallpapers, the contact lenses, the houseplants, the clay mask, the Instagram filter, the dress, the Granny Smith apple, the liquid that submerges the computer keyboard…

— You are forgetting blue: the artificial light, the hair, the pool liner, the sea…

— Blue and green, the preferred colours for image compositing in post-production.

— And those of the sea which, in reality, is neither blue nor green… Water molecules do not absorb these coloured wavelengths and re-emit them on the surface. The appearance a few decades ago of a second sun had a decisive impact on life on Earth. The phenomenal acceleration of photosynthesis first made it possible to solve the pollution problems of the time, before zombie fires multiplied and spread. The doubling of sources of attraction was not without consequences for the production of desire and imagination. Sunflowers, which until then had looked in the same direction, soon turned their backs on one another. — By the way, speaking of green screens, several people are composited, or at least infiltrated, into this story.

— Yes, that’s true, we focus on the duo/couple who in a way form the screen, but other actors literally invite themselves into the dance and make the film’s double bottom shimmer. — And that of this conversation…?

— Who is speaking to me?

— I already hung up. It’s my ghost speaking through me.

— If several people appear subliminally, the end of the film also involves disappearance.

— Yes, or at least the (con)fusion of the two main characters.

— Are they one and the same person? Interchangeable? Intersexed?

— The motif of the double, omnipresent throughout the film, evolves into a form of disturbance that appears as a questioning of what is subjected here to critical scrutiny: the normalized representation of a white heterosexual couple in contemporary society. New beliefs have developed. Alien entities are said to reside on Earth in the form of Gothic sculptures covering their eyes with their hands. The wildest theories circulate about them. They are said to draw anyone who stops looking at them into a deadly game of red light, green light. Melancholic images of these weeping angels begin to circulate massively. Some say they reproduce the capacities of what they represent. Attention becomes a matter of life and death. For others, part of humanity has sheltered extraterrestrial modes of existence since the dawn of time.

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SL: You put into images the "new spirit of capitalism" (Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski). We perceive a certain distress, even a form of de-subjectivation…

EB & MM: This is precisely what we embody in the film, as individuals who are project-creators, high-performing, flexible, and versatile. We wanted to propose a form that would push to its limits this paradigm of the network, which has notably the effect of making everything modular, of flattening everything. Thus private space merges with work space, locations reconfigure endlessly, days blur into nights… The shots themselves follow one another more like PowerPoint slides than in cinematic continuity. Each scene presents a bounded, autonomous action, which could be put at the service of any other story. The links of cause and effect are broken. There is also this idea that everything — even the most banal daily activity, even the sole fact of being — is rationalizable and potentially productive of wealth: our own representation first, in a logic of auto-objectivation, of auto-design — how to be the object of the algorithmic gaze of platforms like Getty or Shutterstock, by making our intimacy available.

SL: Each shot is accompanied by keywords spoken in voice-over, reprising the principle of online video banks, except that here everything is home-made. When the images fall outside the norms, the voice falls silent. Is this a way of suggesting that our language cannot name everything?

EB & MM: For writing the text, we drew inspiration from the keywords and titles associated with stock videos, which serve to describe them very precisely in order to make them rise among millions of others. Superimposed on our own images, these keywords refer to them in the most literal fashion — they characterize them, in a sort of cold poetry. But they also paradoxically have the effect of naming everything, on the same level, even what is not usually named — because it is assimilated into a dominant norm that would not need to declare itself. They appear as symptoms of the loss of natural language, but their hyper-reductive dimension also allows for a great polysemy with which we tried to play throughout the film.

SL: The repetition of motifs creates a form of uncanny familiarity. What signals itself in these stuttering images, in this daily life without apparent drama?

EB & MM: Indeed, the film constructs itself through analogies and returns of motifs: the green, the circle, the succession of narrative loops… which day after day empty the daily routine of the little life that animated it, leaving only a structure running in idle, purged of all narrative. The question of an impenetrable surface at whose threshold we would always be sent back is recurrent — as with the natural or artificial face masks, but also through the omnipresence of the two artifacts that are the mirror and the screen. The protagonists become impenetrable, as if interiority were becoming vacant and made available. To this are added the circumvolutions of the Roomba which traces on the ground almost ritually a circle in the dust, the Amazon assistant which illuminates the summit of its cylinder, a reddening sun that becomes an eclipse at the heart of the lamp…

SL: The machines seem to raise the question of interspecies relations within neoliberal capitalist society. Are you seeking to propose "oddkin" (Donna Haraway)?

EB & MM: Yes, Haraway's work has greatly influenced us. The flattening mentioned above also has the effect of placing the various protagonists on the same level, and renders relations and power relationships ambiguous between them. Alexa is perhaps an assistant at our service, but she carries within her the suspicion of the surveillance she is liable to operate through her continuous connection to the Amazon cloud. The Apple Watch exploits our biometric data, but at a given moment it allows a connection between us via the rhythm of cardiac pulses when we are separated. The presence of these gadgets — which almost all bear first names — thus becomes in turn companion and adversary. Another important influence was Ursula K. Le Guin, notably her Carrier Bag Theory — where the notion of hierarchy is truly undermined. In the film, this syrupy and apparently inexorable dissolution proves terrifying; the only note of hope that remains is perhaps that sentence at the end, which compares us to two drops navigating side by side through the void, forever, unafraid of becoming the sea.

SL: Music plays a major part in the construction of the narrative thread: it warns of drama, accompanies the party. But it is also through music that the subject can define himself when, Maxime, you begin to sing. How did you work on this musical framework?

EB & MM: The treatment of the music is directly linked to that of the images. We opted for a fairly traditional approach in writing the soundtrack, very illustrative and closely aligned with the editing, in the spirit of what John Williams might do, for example. There are themes associated with specific moments, treated sometimes in an analog way (days), sometimes synthetically (nights), returning in loops, evolving and blending into one another.

The very narrative aspect of the music also contributes to the dramaturgy of the whole, to the impression that the story is advancing even though these are most often false leads, as with the final soaring passage that stops too soon. It is an extremely effective way of bringing emotion, and it interests us that this effectiveness never quite lets itself be forgotten.

Music also acts as a binding agent and contributes to the overall feeling of floating through its omnipresence, its ambient layers and its lack of percussive elements, even of tempo: nothing ever jars the viewer. One can also feel a certain familiarity, since all the melodies, chord progressions and arrangements are largely haunted by intertwined musical and cinematic references.

The sound treatment of the voice changes according to the situation: there is more post-production in the second part, where the language switches to English (when we are in this environment that seems virtual), and conversely no effect at all during the brief singing moment, to accompany this attempt to recover “something real.”

SL: The images you have produced replay the aesthetic of those churned out for communication and bought online. At the origin of the project, you wanted to integrate the video into a database so that your work would disseminate outside an artistic framework. Is this still current?

EB & MM: Yes, this is a completely independent aspect, but we plan to submit them as contributors very soon; having respected the constraints necessary for their publication, we have good hopes that a large proportion will be accepted.

In parallel with the edited film, it seems interesting to us to see our shots enter the databases that inspired their aesthetic, in a new context where they will be accessible from one link to another (similarity of keywords, presence of a specific actor…), and distributed royalty-free. We are also curious to see in what new projects they might end up.

SL: By foregrounding all the normed violence these images produce, by becoming conscious of your status as privileged people, it seems to me that this video maps out ways to "transform [your] privileges into tools of struggle" (Rachele Borghi). Do you assume this political dimension?

EB & MM: This denomination of "accomplices" pleases us a great deal. What mattered to us was to speak from our own position, and to create a tension with the visual culture carried by these stock videos — which are in some sense the apex of a capitalist aesthetic, completely rootless, classist and male gaze. We tried to dissect what this conveys through different strategies, sometimes by pushing the trait so hard that it is impossible not to notice the strings, sometimes by opposing alternative forms that undermine the underlying authoritarian or patriarchal ideology, generating a double feeling where visual seduction is continually recalled. For what follows, it is this type of alternative visual form, freed from dominant tropes, without heroes and without an overarching gaze, that we wish to continue to explore.

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As with artists of their generation, online resources are omnipresent, but the use they make of them takes a more complex turn — for example in the video b0mb (2018). Starting from a 1958 poem by Gregory Corso, chosen for both its compositional technique of juxtaposition and its ever-detonating subject (an ode to the atomic bomb), the artists formulated queries for a search engine, so that on hearing Corso's voice (a recording found on the internet) one witnesses the successive appearance of images simultaneously linked to the terms and slightly off-kilter, emanating from current culture. The mediation of the internet produces a distance that reflects our current relationship to the real.

In alternation is projected Lightning Ride (2017). Disquieting and familiar. Realistic and phantasmagoric. Beautiful and ugly. It was made from footage of Taser certification sessions — in the United States, to be authorized to use one, you must test it on yourself — where one sees people collapse under shock and pain, the sequences having been retouched here with Photoshop's "oil painting" tool. The video belongs as much to the register of contemporary social fact as to the representation of martyrs in painting. Trump's America as much as Mantegna's Saint Sebastian, with a touch of Van Gogh. Without forgetting the distance induced by internet culture with its fugacity.

Between b0mb and Lightning Ride, the artists conceived a sound and light installation positioned high behind the projection screen, evoking the passage from one day to the next, from sunrise to sunset, accompanied by the Windows XP startup sound, distorted by stretching. With a 2013 video, Bliss, made from the background image — the verdant hill — of the same Windows XP, the artists had already worked on the new collective memory constituted by software aesthetics.

Finally, an installation occupies a corner of the space and warms us in imagination. More than fifteen monitors broadcast fireplace images sourced from the internet. On the pleasure that this multiplied vision provokes — in an analogy already noted by Jan Dibbets in 1969 with TV as a Fireplace — one can leave the exhibition recalling that the fireplace is at the origin of the history of modern art: Marcel Duchamp recounted that, not having a fireplace at home in 1913, he had constructed a substitute spectacle for himself, with a bicycle wheel to spin at will.

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In a movement exactly opposite but no less ambitious, Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion intend to produce stock images from a film. A Truly Shared Love (2018) is a video of just over five minutes shot by the artist couple, who plan to sell its sequences separately on the image bank Shutterstock. Presented as the trailer for a film to come, the video sketches an autobiographical love story while responding to the generic norms of the banks.

The wager of the film resides in the successful attempt to blend stereotype with the intimate and the artistic project: if one believes Émilie Brout, “we would like to truly move, a bit like the films of the New Wave, which are very distanced and at the same time bearers of genuine emotions.” The aim, in sum, is to create chameleon-images that are also works of art. Shutterstock has already accepted several of the sequences filmed by Brout and Marion. It remains to be seen what sense these images — whose appearances alone are generic — will take on when, once purchased, they slip into new contexts.

At La Chaufferie, the art center of Strasbourg affiliated with the Haute École des arts du Rhin, a religious atmosphere reigns. The building's church-like appearance, produced partly by its pitched roof, has not been lost on the artist duo Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion, whose exhibition Collapsing New People occupies the space. Where an altar might stand, two films are projected in alternation, combining sacrificial and communal dimensions.

B0mb (2018), the first film, takes as its starting point the eponymous jazz piece by Gregory Corso, whose text — a poem written in 1958 — is an ode to destruction: a love letter to the nuclear bomb. The artists have juxtaposed images drawn from the web and generated endlessly by an algorithm. The work continually renews itself, fed pell-mell by mainstream and alternative currents alike, so specific to the visual culture of the internet.

The effect is striking in how closely the image clings to the words, and in how controlled the resulting irony appears. A bitter intoxication, pleasurable yet nauseating, seems to accompany the all-too-current disintegration of an eroding world.

Behind the projection, high up, a bluish light radiates. It is Sssuuunnn, a set of LED bars programmed to imitate sunrise and sunset. When the first film nears its end, the light turns red like a call from the heavens: “let there be light, and there was light” (Genesis 1:1–4), an instant of artificial elevation. The slowed-down sound of Windows XP then rings out, evoking days paced by the starting up and shutting down of the computer.

Inspired by the latest connected lamps meant to improve sleep quality, the work also questions the gradual intrusion of technologies into the home, collecting personal data during the quietest hours.

The second film, Lightning Ride (2017), is composed of excerpts from amateur videos of “Taser Certifications.” This certification, which involves being tasered oneself, is a compulsory rite of passage for any American civilian hoping to acquire such a weapon. Close-ups show faces deformed by suffering, hysterical groups surrounding a suffering martyr so swiftly turned into a hero.

Against a psychedelic musical backdrop, the images are slowed down and subjected to Photoshop's “oil painting” filter; they evoke Renaissance paintings, liturgical scenes with ecstatic bodies. Pleasure sometimes hides in the wings of pain, emerging in the violence of unsuspected moments of ecstasy.

Gleaned from YouTube, these videos exceed millions of views and accumulate comments such as “1:53 omg I laughed and laughed til I cried,” illustrating the enjoyment of a voyeurism tinged with a certain sadism.

Faced with the violence of these diverted images, all taken from the internet, the growing unease nevertheless remains bearable, even exciting, since the spectator, more alive than ever, knows that they are warm. In one corner of the room stands Fireplace, an ensemble of screens — iPads, televisions, computers of all kinds arranged haphazardly — broadcasting fireplace videos. These are available on Netflix and all other livestreaming platforms.

The height of kitsch for some, fascinating for millions of other users; here again, re-presentation substitutes itself for the real, pointing to an ever more disembodied relationship with the world.

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The euphoria of the early years (access, decompartmentalization, no financial cost, sharing) has been replaced by a growing suspicion (surveillance, dissimulation, manipulation, malicious intent and abuse), making the web an unavoidable space of contrasts that has surreptitiously taken over our lives and is ripe for all of our human projections.

To kick off the season, La Villa du Parc extended an invitation to Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion, whose work has already figured in several group shows at the center, Terrible Two (2013) and Les Incessants (2015). This recent invitation gathers to a point a number of thematic lines that have run through the center’s programming over the last few years, including artistic collaboration, the new uses images are put to, and the fictional interpretation of documents.

The publication of Artistes iconographes sparked a desire to update an examination of the digital with this invitation to a duo who were born in the 1980s and are indeed very “millennial” in their interest in new technology – and whose art is grounded in the appropriation of images with or against the tools of production and diffusion.

Locating their work in a back-and-forth movement between the online sphere and the off, the two artists have focused their show at La Villa du Parc on depicting their personal and professional lives together, selecting for their first “solo” exhibition in a French art institution a dozen pieces, videos for the most part, along with an online presentation inspired by the domestic ambiance of the contemporary art center.

You should only have eyes for me

It is this very ‘80s refrain by the soul duo Womack & Womack that Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion, an artist couple both at home and in the studio, have chosen as the title of their show at La Villa du Parc. “You should only have eyes for me,” lovers proclaim – and, from behind their screens, innumerable internet users cry out in search of anonymous followers. As a rough guide, the hashtag #followme, for instance, is referenced some 437 million times on Instagram at this writing.

We see here the contemporary obsession with trying to grab attention, which nowadays plays out on social networks with publicly sharing selfies and other images that show off people’s private lives. The race for digital popularity generates a few gems and lots of stereotypes by making hundreds of thousands of amateur images public which are indiscriminately thrown together with advertising images that imitate or mold them in a virtual commercial strategy that is perfectly calibrated and runs like a well-oiled machine.

It is this now viral cliché imagery that Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion appropriate in their films and installations, using the tools made available by the web while taking amateur practices and uses to the extreme.

In the register of online appropriation, the artists’ new film b0mb features lines from the famous poem of the same name by the American Beat poet Gregory Corso. The lines are translated into French by the artists using a search engine looking for images posted on the internet. With each viewing the film shows the images with the greatest number of references that their search yielded, creating a hypnotic film-poem that is constantly changing.

Corso’s love poem dedicated to the atomic bomb, which draws on the whole world and a vast range of references, favors the diversity of images that is representative of web culture, whose flow is conveyed by the poet’s own voice, which has been reworked on a magnetic soundtrack. At La Villa du Parc the piece echoes an immense digital blaze of chimney fires crackling away, for the ambiance apparently.

In counterpoint to this carefully worked apocalypse in the bottomless well of the circulation of data, which, by the way, affiliates the artists with the great post-internet family of prosumers (that is, producers and consumers), Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion reverse the situation in a series of pieces where they work themselves into other people’s images.

Thus, in Ghosts of Your Souvenir, a series of photographs exploring photobombing (i.e., the art of getting yourself into others’ photos to wreck them), they strike poses at tourist sites and then hunt down their discreet presence in the background of images spread on the social networks.

Drawing on recent professional and recreational technologies like virtual reality, the artist couple cultivate a comical DIY dimension in the film dp, conjuring up the experiments from the early days of cinema. Vacation pictures, a walk in their neighborhood, a gallery opening, even a sex tape, it is the whole online iconographic tradition of day-to-day reality and family life which they form a memory of.

They are working on a film project, moreover, and the two have decided to feature the soundtrack in a special preview at La Villa du Parc. A Truly Shared Love is a love film where they are the main actors. The film consists of a montage of sequences that have also been made available separately for sale on Shutterstock, an image platform that provides illustrators, visual artists, and advertisers with images that are free of any copyright.

Formatted, scripted, and filmed to correspond to the platform’s many content limitations, the film shows their daily reality through the lens of a disturbing oddness in a consciously struck balance between authenticity and obvious distancing, private space and the mass diffusion that goes on over the internet.

Throughout the featured works then there appears a kind of subdued ode, fascinating and harrowing, in which there is an endless shifting between the real and the virtual, and where the artists’ talents are put to crafting a vision of their private world that is both sincere and cut from the whole cloth.

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"Quickening" thus implements several zones of indistinction between a priori antinomic poles. Firstly between bodies and machines, in particular with Denim, a series of jeans sealed under plastic, acting as specimens of an archeology of the future, showing the marks of mobile phones, as if they were just one with their owner, and have become prosthesis or augmented reality of their own bodies. This indifferentiation between organic and artificial can also be found in Oasis Max Life, a sculpture made of touchscreens embedded in a brick of floral foam showing animated GIFs of green plants taken from the Internet. A cyborg plant, where nature, however wild it may be, is nothing more than just a digital code for domestic use. This shifting is represented in Chien-loup which consists of multiple camouflage jackets sewn together so to create the pattern of an endless tree on a neon-orange background, an invisible color for game animals. A high-tech textile here allows predators-hunters to fade into the forest and to adopt the principle of camouflage used by their preys, the virtual future of nature thus mixing up for human beings with a strange becoming-animal.

Another way of blurring boundaries is at work with the ❤ Paintings: four mobile phones hung up on the wall like little paintings display photos taken from different Instagram accounts followed by the artists, partly covered and reproduced identically by means of painting. It’s a way for the artists to take these picturesque images back to their possible unconscious, namely by a set of representations originating from art history, especially from German Romanticism, which built and informed our perception of the landscape. Here, just like with cyborgs, there is no more opposition between nature and culture, original and copy, everything is already hybridizations and replications with no origin, model or essence. It's a similar type of indifferentiation which seems to operate with Clé USB reçue par erreur contenant l’œuvre La Liberté en écorchée – version longue d’ORLAN et saisie dans la glace par Laurent Pernot via www.matchart.net. As a matter of fact, like the title indicates, the work was produced from an USB key of ORLAN, a cyborg artist by the way, the artists received by mistake and which they seized in fake ice thanks to the artist Laurent Pernot. This piece made collectively questions notions such as the author, the original and the copy as well as the truth and the false.

With Lightning Ride, it is now poles of technology, organics and mysticism that collide with electricity as a connecting point. The video is produced from excerpts of "Taser Certifications", a sort of ceremony authorizing in the United States the use of Tasers in the condition of being tased by someone else. Filtered with the Photoshop’s "oil painting effect”, slowed down and accompanied by a disturbing soundtrack, the succeeding images show us bodies and faces whose deformations and positions evoke a feeling of pain as well as a Christian ecstacy. Everything unfolds as if the miracle of electricity, symbol of the rationalization of the world, revived paradoxically an aspiration to transcendence, antipodes joining each other and disappearing in profit of a new map of possibilities.

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What seems quite extraordinary is that, in an era in which the surveillance systems of the NSA and other intelligence agencies could get hold of any information they want, we still do not know exactly who Satoshi Nakamoto is. For this purpose, the artists Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion have tried to create some (real) fake ID documents for him in order to provide some proof of his existence.

Completely out of the blue, in 2008 someone using the name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ published a research paper on the mailing list Cryptography, setting out the basic principles of the revolutionary Bitcoin protocol. In 2009 the first version of the Bitcoin software was made available and he created the first units of the currency. Satoshi is well-known for communicating uniquely through e-mails and not over the phone. His last contribution dates back to the end of 2010 ? which was exactly when his new technological invention was starting to attract attention. That was also when he handed the control over to Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin’s chief scientist. It seems that Satoshi Nakamoto, who is described by his peers as a genius, disappeared from public view just as suddenly as he had attracted attention to him.

Despite the regular media announcements claiming the identity/ies hiding behind the pseudonym has/have been discovered, all the potential people have denied being behind it with statements such as “I am not Satoshi Nakamoto … but even if I were I wouldn’t tell you”.
A name which is often quoted is that of computer specialist Nick Szabo, an ex-cypherpunk (a group whose aim was ensuring the protection of private life through the use of cryptography), who developed a decentralised digital currency called Bit Gold ? which in a way was a direct forerunner of Bitcoin. Before him, Satoshi « Dorian » Nakamoto, a 65 year-old Japanese-American based in California made the front page of the magazine Newsweek on 6th March 2014 when he was presented as “the face of Bitcoin”. Because of his name, his life became a nightmare due to all the media attention. In order to support his “revelations”, the Newsweek journalist brought up his past as a systems engineer working for top secret defence projects, together with some statements by people close to him describing him as a humble genius obsessed with private life. It must be said that, if that were true, it would be legitimate to wonder why he chose to use his real family name.

Fascinated by this modern myth, the artists Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion attempted last year to create some (real) fake ID documents for him by using darknet, i.e. networks ensuring anonymity and the hideout of all sorts of activities (whether legal or not).
That was the beginning of a long investigation online to try to gather all the necessary elements in order to create a fake Japanese passport. Indeed, Satoshi states he is Japanese on the forum of the P2P foundation. “Research on web.archive.org and the reddit.com Bitcoin forum confirms that the date of birth given by Nakamoto himself is 5th April 1975”, state the investigators. They chose to make the passport issue date coincide with the registration date of the bitcoin.org website by Nakamoto in Panama on 18th August 2008.

“From his first public message and up to his disappearance on 12th December 2010, Nakamoto did all he could to protect his identity”, wrote the artists while listing the strategies he used to cover his traces. Neither the analysis of his code (which seems that of brilliant mathematician good at cryptography and a skilled but not professional programmer) nor his writing style have led to a conclusion ? therefore giving rise to all sorts of more or less supported speculations and conspiracy theories. As he has always used different IP addresses, identifying his exact location has been difficult. Others have paid attention to when he sends and replies to emails, but he writes at different times and therefore cannot easily be linked to a time zone. Some people have even tried to analyse his writing in order to determine his nationality. However, although his favourite language seems to be English, he switches between British and American spelling and colloquial expressions. This could either mean that Satoshi tries to hide his nationality or that he is in fact more than one person or even a whole organisation.

As ID photo, Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion chose the portrait which is usually used to represent him on the Internet and in the media. “In reality, this image comes from the video Seven Billion: Are you typical?, produced by the National Geographic in 2011, which presents a synthesis of the average human face, the face of M. Everybody”, explain the artists, who had to touch up the low definition photo to make it credible. “We tried to reconstruct an identity on the basis of the information we were able to gather and to produce proof of Satoshi Nakamoto’s existence by means of the technology he created …”. .

Once this biographical information had been gathered, Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion started navigating with TOR ? the anonymity network ? to get in touch with forgers, covering their traces via a secure email service and a VPN (virtual private network). After searching for several weeks, they reached a deal with a group probably based in Cambodia that could produce high-quality Japanese passports. Of course, they paid for this in bitcoins, the popular currency for online anonymous transactions.
After obtaining a scan of the passport for validation (photo), the artists paid a second down payment and the passport was sent on 7th June 2014 (placed inside a book according to the counterfeiters’ version), but never reached its destination. According to the latest news, the “goods” are stuck in Romania. There is no way of checking.

The scan is to this day the only existing trace of this passport ? ultimately, it is a digital file which is just as intangible as its owner. “We did not manage to make him real, which means Satoshi Nakamoto remains in a grey area, between reality and fiction, thereby increasing the rumours and fantasies surrounding his character”, says Emilie Brout. Even if the artists didn’t manage to capture him in an artefact, their project Satoshi Nakamoto (The Proof) encourages us to delve into the troubled waters of contemporary economies and the darknet ? a place with a strong fictional element to it. At the same time, through this project we can pay tribute to a contemporary myth who redefined value while also enabling Bitcoin to develop as a real open source project, regardless of the true identity of its creator.

The project also has a second more psychedelic side to it, called Satoshi Nakamoto (The Myth). The artists produced an animation using one of the 3D face models that is most widespread on the net. Then they placed Satoshi Nakamoto’s appearance over it. What we see is a mask that doesn’t look at us but constantly divides into two and changes. A Janus with multiple faces ? a monstrous enigma that is not ready to reveal its secrets.

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In today’s post-capitalist, post-digital, post-whatever societies, moreover, both these definitions look outdated. Today, value is much more unstable, much more ephemeral, much more liquid than this. And it’s, more often than not, unfair. How much is worth one minute of labor? How much is worth the future? How much is worth Greece? How much is worth a company trading in information? How much is worth a single piece of information? How much is worth attention? How much is worth a work of art? Each of this things, the very same thing, may vary on a scale from 0 to 1 billion something.

The value of information, attention and works of art is so unstable that, very properly, they have become currencies themselves.

The meaning of value in a post-whatever era, the mass abundance of images – from amateur image production to professional images to algorithmically generated images – and the consequent shift of the artist from production to post-production – and from the creation of works to the generation of formats – are all recurring topics in the recent work of Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion. Since 2009 the French couple has been focusing on projects that, renovating the modernist language of film, make an extensive use of appropriated content from the web, which is freed from its status of meaningless, apparently valueless data floating in the information networks to be rearranged in complex, algorithmically generated, sometimes interactive narratives, or into powerful, iconic images.

In this context, the foundation of Untitled SAS (2015) may look like a smart yet radical move out of this line of research, while it is, in fact, a further step in the same direction, though less visual and more conceptual. In French, SAS stands for “société par actions simplifiées”, the equivalent of a registered limited company (LTD or INC in English). Untitled SAS is an immaterial work of art whose medium is a company business, with “work of art” as corporate purpose and with a capital open to everybody interested in buying shares at their own price. The starting capital of the company is set to 1,00 € (the minimum legally possible), and 10,000 shares are made available. With a freely negotiable capital, the company allows each collector/shareholder to buy and sell shares at the price he set, thus influencing the company’s overall value (displayed on a dedicated website).

In order to set up the company, the artists worked with one of the largest and oldest lawyer’s office of Paris, Granrut Avocats, who had to resolve many new legal paradoxes for its official registration in the French Trade and Companies Register. A similar gesture was performed, years ago, by the Austrian-Swiss collective etoy, who registered themselves as an actual company in Switzerland, with making art as its corporate purpose. But while etoy, in the early years of the internet, were embracing – in an over-affirmative way – the utopian dream of the new economy in order to set them free from the rules of the art market, Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion are more interested in giving birth to a useless yet fully functional machine that performs and mirrors the ways of working of the current art market, where the value of artworks looks less rooted in the material value of the object or in the cultural value of the work, and more in the ability of a few disruptive characters to manipulate it at their will. At the same time, however, as a socially owned, immaterial artwork with a starting value set to the minimum and able to increase with the help of a community of collectors/shareholders, Untitled SAS is the archetypal work of art: like a medieval church, it mirrors and represents the power in charge, while at the same time being available for the larger society. It also bears some spiritual connotations, recalling the Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959) by Yves Klein: the empty space exchanged for gold is replaced by the empty shell of a company turned into shares. Finally, it is the perfect portrait of companies like Facebook, that started valueless and evolved into modern golden calfs.

In such companies, value is mostly generated by their ability to attract users, to welcome user generated content that draws in other users, and to capitalize on their private data: which turns amateur cultural production and privacy into two key issues to understand the present day. In this context, Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion often become modern gold diggers involved into what David Joselit called “an Epistemology of Search”. This can be seen in many works on show, including Regulus, Ghosts of Your Souvenirs (2014 – ongoing), Les Nouveaux chercheurs d’or and Return of the Broken Screens (2015). Regulus is a generative animation based on a program that browses websites like Flickr, Instagram and Google Images in real time, in search of pictures that respond to some formal criteria then used to organize the visual flow. While the focus of their interest – the presence of round shapes – takes center stage, the main subject of these pictures – and the reason why they have been shared in the first place – fades in the background without disappearing completely, being perceived as a background noise or a flow of subconscious images. The piece also shares with Untitled SAS an experimental attitude toward how cultural value is translated into market value: instead of being sold as a unique or an edition, this ever evolving piece is chunked into small samples and sold by weight.

Like Regulus, Ghosts of Your Souvenirs is an ongoing collection of found amateur pictures where the main subject becomes secondary when the viewer understands the organizing principle of the collection: the presence, in the background, of Emilie or Maxime (or both), posing for a photographer who’s not interested in them. In order to develop the project, the artists stood for one or more days in a chosen place of touristic interest – on the Rialto Bridge in Venice, or in front of Notre Dame de Paris – trying to be featured in as many tourist photos as possible; and later spent hours on image sharing sites like Instagram and Flickr, looking for images taken that day in that place. The collection thus becomes an outsourced self portrait, that takes advantage of the ubiquity of the camera eye, the seamlessness of sharing and the informational nature of digital images, all equipped with their metatags.

If Regulus and Ghosts of Your Souvenir deal with the explosion of amateur cultural production, other works in the show are a take on online economics. Les Nouveaux chercheurs d’or is an ongoing collection of free golden samples of golden products sold on the internet. Gold is a universal symbol of value, and a way to turn any prosaic, mass produced item into something shiny and desirable. By collecting these samples, Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion are interested in the conflict between their luxurious look, their free nature and the complexity of the economics that produced them, that they research in depth, trying to provide as much information as possible about the collected item.

This interest in the background story of the collected pieces is shared by Return of the Broken Screens, based on a collection of broken display technologies. Commercially speaking, tech items are valuable when they work, and totally valueless when broken. A small incident can turn an expensive gadget into something you are lucky if you don’t have to spend money to get rid of it. But a small incident can also be an interesting story; and a damaged display is just another kind of display. That’s why Emilie and Maxime research into these stories and create customized abstract videos for these displays, responding to their cracks and choosing shapes and colors according to their ability to activate a given part of the screen – fully aware that the decay will go on and that the work in the present form will be short lived.

Actually, most of the works by Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion have a performative nature that makes the work displayed in the gallery appear as the temporary, inevitably limited instantiation of an ongoing process, rather than a finished piece. This is literally true for Nakamoto (The Proof), 2014 – 2015, an attempt to produce a portrait of the legendary founder of Bitcoin using the economic and technical system he gave birth to as a “brush”. Bitcoin is a virtual currency widely used on “darknets” like the Tor network, and allowing to perform online transactions anonymously. Despite (or thanks to?) its virtual nature, during the financial recession its value has grown up constantly, and it has been perceived as a safe-haven asset. With an estimated fortune of several hundred million euros, Satoshi Nakamoto still lives in the grey zone between fiction and reality, thanks to his ability to preserve his identity. After collecting all the available information about Nakamoto, Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion browsed Tor in order to get in touch with a group of passport forgers, probably based in Cambodia, and commissioned them a fake passport of Nakamoto, in the attempt to produce an evidence of his existence using the technology he created. After getting a scan of the passport for validation, they paid the second instalment and the passport was shipped on June 7, 2014, but it was never delivered to them, the scan still being the only evidence of its existence. Unavailable as an artifact, as a story Nakamoto (The Proof) works as a research into the folds of contemporary economics, and a tribute to a modern myth that was both able to reinvent value as well as to preserve himself to be turned into a product.

Original text

It is easy to be swept up into the pleasures of the spectacle in a work such as Dérives. Its form allows us to permanently oscillate between recognition and anticipation: a sort of name-that-sequence game wherein we try to identify each one of its famous and not-so-famous sequences, mixed in with a certain feeling of anticipation as we wonder what next image will carry the wave on its journey.

As for actually attempting to read this wave, i.e. to dive beneath its surface and to observe its construction from within its depths, the exercise is far more perilous. If we start with the 2,000 images, we quickly realise that this database is nothing more than a cloud of disparate points. Nowhere do we find this wave, this flow of water with its internal movement; instead we find nothing but a collection of drops. For, in reality, the work is far more than a simple collection wherein one need only to collect a series of images in order to capture the "image" of water in all its states. Indeed, there are 2,000 image sequences that together make up the work; but it is not enough to reunite 2,000 sequences alone in order to compose a work such as Dérives. Hence a drunken sense of disorientation before a flow of images that we appreciate on an intuitive level, without being able to fully identify its origin.

"Mr Palomar sees a wave rise in the distance, grow, approach, change form and colour, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away. But it is very difficult to isolate one wave, separating it from the wave immediately following it, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away…" –Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar

When spectators are informed that the film they are watching has been "generated" by a computer with a dedicated algorithm, their first reaction is often to ask if the result has been "programmed in advance". If one where to reply no, the algorithm varies the film endlessly, the spectator often concludes that the process is therefore "purely random". As if it is perfectly natural, even necessary, to oppose "programmed" (i.e. "predetermined") processes and "random" (i.e. "undetermined") processes. But just such an opposition would never work in the case of Dérives, whose operating principle is to create a sole and unique film, always coherent, while navigating within a fluctuating collection of images that never produces the exact same result. In other words, a purely "random" film would be nothing but incoherent juxtapositions of sequences that had nothing to do with each other, a cacophony without much artistic value. This is clearly not the case of Dérives, for whom the sinuous juxtapositions of images are not only logical, but also full of an undeniable poetic and emotional force. On the other hand, a film created by an entirely "predetermined" program, i.e. wherein the machine would have no room for autonomous action, would harken back to a classically linear film, more or less edited "by hand" with a sequence of images more or less determined by its creator in advance. This is clearly not the case either, given that this flow of images named Dérives will never be exactly the same sequence of images.

The difficulty comes from our inability to perceive the rich interaction of simple elementary particles (the images) and the process which reunites them into a common purpose (the image). If, perhaps inspired by Mr Palomar, the spectator attempts to analyse each algorithmic edit separately (sequence A > sequence B), he or she will miss the algorithmic ensemble which constructs the film over time. This larger sequence can only be observed as a whole, which ironically means in the role of a classical spectator of cinema allowing him or herself to be swept away by the image.

"While our senses respond to everything, our soul cannot pay attention to every particular. That is why our confused sensations are the result of a variety of perceptions. This variety is infinite. It is almost like the confused murmuring which is heard by those who approach the shore of a sea. It comes from the continual beatings of innumerable waves." – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on metaphysics, §33; Montgomery, George R. & Chandler, Albert R., translators.

In its natural form, as in the program conceived by Emilie and Maxime, a wave is composed of a multitude of different components, interacting on multiple levels and all at once. The global form emerges from the complexity of these individual interactions, hence the sensation of an intangible perception: the "confused murmuring" of which Leibniz speaks, and which cannot be perceived outside of an emotional affect, both intuitive and all encompassing.

For the author of an algorithm, it is often impossible to write the program in one single stroke, especially given that the complexity of its final output makes it all too difficult to orchestrate via some masterfully rationalised architecture. Nevertheless, a computer program must be executed within the constraints of the machine, which requires for its part both explicitness and rationality. There is no room for ambiguity in the machine, for whom such an ambiguity can only lead to a refusal of execution:

"error: call of overloaded 'function(type)' is ambiguous"

How then does one write just such an algorithm — at once subtle and evolving, i.e. generative — within a materially determined assemblage with its language of explicitly rational constraints?

The solution lies in the orchestration of individual interactions of each drop, but multiplied up to the scale of an ocean of possible droplets. This technique of using the singular, only propagated to fill a field of possibilities, is precisely one of the internal logics proper to computer programming. It is a method for treating a great number of data points individually, but all at once.

There is a table of values at the heart of Dérives which describes the possible interactions of all the images contained within the work. It is a list of keywords and values arranged in categories and which allow for the establishment of a general framework for the different narrative, logical and aesthetic possibilities for the images. It is a table of values cross-referenced with each and every image. In the category "divisions of water", for example, we find values such as "unitary mass", "numerous droplets", or "rain". Through such a description we can begin to see a certain distinction made between two complex ideas of "unity", along with the transition that might lead us from one to the other: ocean and rain are two opposing forms of water masses, opposed precisely in the manner in which they gather their internal elements. By explicitly describing this opposition and the transition between them, the machine can then deal with such subtleties much more easily. Each of the 2,000 images is described to the machine in this fashion, image by image. This category, "divisions of water", is more or less factual, as are descriptions of "weather" or of "light". They allow for the program to understand characteristics of the images that are more or less objectively perceivable by the spectator. But we also find other, more subjective categories, such as those of "hedonism", which describes images to the machine on an entirely different scale of measure. This category, along with descriptors of the level of "tension" within the image, allow Emilie and Maxime to reunite images in a far more subtle manner, on the level of sensations, all the while making them readable to the machine. From these descriptors they can then run a series of routines that string together images in sequences that progressively increase the "tension" until a certain level of "hedonism" is achieved. By multiplying these criteria and running them in parallel, the result is made far more complex without having to play off of one and only musical cord. It is a subtle dance of sine waves, flowing in and out of interactions between several simultaneous criteria which, individually, are linked together linearly but which collectively make possible a more complex form: a wave of images.

This central table of Dérives — these descriptors of the internal forces of the images — is a lot smaller than one might think: not more than about twenty categories. And within each category there are very few levels of variation: usually two or three, sometimes a little more, but never growing beyond a dozen. For it is not in multiplying the number of categories that such a table will somehow improve the "generative" qualities of a work. To the contrary, it is precisely the reduction of criteria to their strict minimum which gives Dérives its force as a work of art, allowing it to dance a fine line oscillating delicately between the chaos of a tsunami and the calm of a sleepy riverbed. Too many criteria would push the work to the edge of entropy: a chaos similar to a film edited by the roll of dice. And too few categories would force the film into an all-too-predictable form: a sort of mechanical loop of the same repeating themes. It is in this in-between state where we find the internal current of the algorithm, wherein the film is always at the edge of change while retaining coherence and a sense of logical progression. It is at once discernible, perceptible for the spectator and yet impossible to fully grasp, impossible to put put our finger on the exact nature of the image which would allow us to freeze the wave in one single frame.

As we let wash over us this dance of differing and deferring criteria, generated in an undulating movement of the program which is also that of the image, the spectator enters and exits the image as they please. Given that the program theoretically never stops, Dérives has no "duration" in the classical cinematic sense of the term, i.e. a time delimited by the physical beginning and end of the media device. Nevertheless — and this is the case with any film —, there is yet another "duration" which emerges from the image: the duration generated by the consciousness of the spectator. Just as in Bergson's description of sugar dissolving in a glass of water (here held by Mia Farrow or Emily Watson) and the time it takes to dissolve, each and every spectator drinks these images in their own manner, as if they were destined for us individually. Dérives is this particular scene: each and every spectator perceiving their own specific moment within the ebb and flow of an image generated here and now, before our very eyes, just for us, and yet which does not stop for us either. By following the movement of the algorithm we are perfectly capable of perceiving the logical transitions from one sequence to the next, and even of understanding the criteria which unite them; and yet incapable all the while of freezing the image as a whole and observe all its interactions in a rational unity. Our consciousness enters and exits this current while the ebb and flow of the image remains quite objectively within its own logic and its own temporal existence. A play, algorithmic in its nature, of the rising tides of images and of the image. The misty image of a wave, a vague, floating image, or, as one can only say in French, une image vague.

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