The creations of Christophe Bruno have been presented in lots of contexts
from contemporary art fairs like the Fiac or Arco to new media
festivals like Ars Electronica or Transmediale. This artist works on
images like he does on words and particularly loves language when he
denounces a “semantic capitalism” or a “privatization of the look”. His
“decay of the aura of language”, called “Dadamètre”, is currently shown
at the Espace Virtuel du Jeu de Paume.
Fascinum
Fascinum (2001) is part of the first search engines hack produced by
Christophe Bruno. This piece was presented as an online installation at
the Arco of Madrid, where it was awarded with the @ARCO New Media Prize
2007, and it is still accessible on line as a website. It shows
pictures that are currently the most viewed on national Yahoo portals.
A screen capture of a tyrant or the election of a president is enough
to make this images mosaic uniform.
Google Adwords Happening
How to spend money with my art?, was wondering Christophe Bruno in 2002
when he created a Happening looking like an advertisement campaign. He
then bought keywords like "Symptom" or "Dream" from Google to promote
his site through short poems. But the American company quickly closed
his account under the excuse of an economically non efficient enough
strategy. The artist protested against what he called “semantic
capitalism” creating a table of values, in dollars, of words and nouns
in which we can learn that the word “free” is the most expensive one.
Human Browser
But Christophe Bruno also made performances when he created, in 2004,
Human Browser that was played two years later by Manon Kahle during the
festival of art and new media in Berlin Transmediale. Equipped with a
headphone, she was “enslaved” by Google answers, in real time, to
requests made by the artist via a wifi connection. The actress,
interpreting pages of the search engines converted by a "Text To
Speech" application, became the first “human browser”.
Logo.Hallucination
Is the economic dynamic of collective hallucination taking us towards a
privatization of the glance? was wondering Christophe Bruno in 2006,
when he seeked the talent of a programmer to develop a shapes
recognition software able to scan the Internet, continuously, in order
to locate logos of brands able to hide in images. And the artist
demonstrated via his blog Logo.Hallucination, the subliminal presence
of Atari in a Vermeer and Carrefour in a Da Vinci, informing at the
same time those companies of a possible violation of the intellectual
property code.
Dadamètre
The Dadamètre is one of the last creations of Christophe Bruno who was
inspired by the work of French writer Raymond Roussel. He presents it
as a decay of the aura of language. The artist maps the language
according to parameters like homophony or semantic proximity from data
coming from Google. Thus, the R.R.Engine application that can be found
on the Dadamètre website, allow us to poetically navigate from word to
word controlling at the same time cursors of this very same parameters.
Dominique Moulon
Website: www.christophebruno.com
Exhibition: Le Dadamètre, Espace Virtuel du Jeu de Paume until 5th avril 2009 in Paris.
Information:
Fascinum : www.unbehagen.com/fascinum
Google Adwords Happening : www.iterature.com/adwords
Human Browser : www.iterature.com/human-browser
Logo.Hallucination : www.logohallucination.com
Dadamètre : www.iterature.com/dadameter
From: MCD 51
