Back to technological future.
Nowadays,
artistic events devoted to connections between art and technology are
facing a paradox : how to stand back from technological glorifications,
in a consumerist world constantly saturated by new gadgets?
RIAM (International Multimedia Art Meetings) have always focused on
analyzing and criticizing the technology’s role and the artists way of
appropriate and embezzled it. Even if technology have transformed our
everyday life in a distinct way, RIAM’s programming has never been
blindly rushed into enthusiasm for new technological feats.
It seems evident to us that media and technical evolution have
radically transformed our way of organizing, interpreting and
understanding the world. The German philosopher Friedrich A. Kittler (1)
proposes a regard on technology which links it to cognitive models in
history. According to him, technological tools are structuring thought,
they aren’t neutral: if they are the result of human inventions’
capacity, they are also a mean to modify our link with the world.
Across technical history, this RIAM edition make a sort of
inventions’ archaeology, reconsidering as well successively replaced
media (16 mm film, super 8, audio tape, polaroïd, analogical
synthesizer, pinhole, vinyl, video recorder) as functions, objectives
(and dreams) which are often abandoned too.
In this context, many artists have recently taken an interest in
low-tech technology, recycling obsolete analogical models. It consists
in investing autonomy, according to a " do it yourself " principle.
Others artists can take an interest in transfers between low and high
tech, as existing in our everyday’s life practices, where phone coexist
with virtual social networks. Some of them, are still applying to use
with irony old technological terms when using high level tools, in a
resistance to fascination produced by smooth images and media imagery.
At the heart of these artists reflections, there is a questioning
about progress illusion, which have became the technological market’s
catch phrase, constantly searching for new consummation horizons. In
parallel, many artists are also wondering about production’s means
bidding and imposed scale’s change in festivals and biennials contexts,
which are dominated by communication strategy at the expense of real
artistic’s issues.
So, this RIAM edition is aiming take a temporal step back, without
falling into a retro-futuristic aesthetic. It rather consists in
understanding the present by taking an interest in how past technology
made us dreaming about an-other future.
(1) Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Writing Science), the original edition dates from 1986.
With:
Gilles Pourtier, Yann Leguay, Sister Iodine, Why am I Mr Pink ?, Jessica Warboys, Vincent Epplay & Samon Takahashi, Chaos Physique, *25*, Samon Takahashi & Emanuele Carcano, Aurélien Froment, Charles Pennequin & Pakito Bolino, David Sillanoli, Le liquide de la tête, Sylvain Courtoux & Emmanuel Rabu, Edith Azam, Durewar, Artkillart, CHDH, Bruno Natal, Lena, Disrupt & MC Soom T, Kode 9, MC2
version Fr
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