REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE
Simon Asencio, Neal Beggs, Vincent Broquaire, Juliette Goiffon & Charles Beauté, Caroline Delieutraz, Julien Grossmann, Albertine Meunier, Marine Peixoto et Jia Qiu
Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nancy
When what seems small is proved huge, when what is far become intimate, our perceptions are challenged. The infrareal takes root in the dissolution of distances and instants. But how to coexist when each of us can be at the same time here and somewhere else ? How to make a society under the instability of time and space scales ?
Following the intuition that our current environment is affected by technological devices always more instantaneous, and the means of communication always more connected, we are searching to identify the scale contrasts of time and space, which are forming our daily life. The exhibition Reach out and touch someone presents a selection of works, which operate as a strategic tag on the present situation.
In the text Other spaces. Heterotopia, Michel Foucault considers the experience of space as what is centrally at stake in post-modern society. In 1967, Foucault characterizes spaces by the relations that spaces develop with the ones that surround them. But the spaces in which we are living now are places and at the same time interfaces towards others places. We are constantly somewhere and in contact with somewhere else. Sometimes even the place where we are still only holds interest for the focus it offers on the surface and for the contacts and the exchanges that are stimulated by it. Such a ubiquity leads us to understand what kinds of relationships humans are sharing. How are these “neighbourly relations” embodied today ?
The slogan “Reach out and touch someone” was published in the 80’s by the communication company New Jersey Bell for a publicity campaign about long distance telephony. “ You just need to touch the handset of your phone to reach someone at the other end of the world” the advertisement intoned. For more than a hundred years now,technological devices have been in charge of putting people in contact. The exhibition Reach out and touch someone formulates the game of tacit illusion that technological innovation implicates. Because even if one understands that one doesn’t really “touch someone”, one accepts the phenomenological experience as a reality.
Our research articulates real and virtual spaces. In an era suited to quantifiable experimentation, the articulation between these two spaces seems chaotic. The artworks exhibited play with this confusion, emphasizing the ellipsis, instants and projections in time and space that are at stake in cultural production. They set the frame of new symbolic spaces common to different social groups that are necessary for a renewal of ways to live together.
Sans titre, Marine Peixoto, 2012, © Les commissaires anonymes -
Performance « Taux d’invisibilité », Simon Acencio, 2013, © Les commissaires anonymes -
Vernissage de l’exposition jeudi 24 janvier 2013, © Les commissaires anonymes -
Top Cent, Juliette Goiffon et Charles Beauté, 2012, © Les commissaires anonymes -
Au delà de 1m/s, Albertine Meunier, 2012, © Les commissaires anonymes -
