Fossilation

A large transparent canvas seems to hover horizontally over the ground. Its bright colour is slightly animated by the fluctuating lights that shine through it. Several cables come out of the bottom of this vast membrane, like they're growing straight out of it; they stretch out towards the ceiling as if trying to cling to it. This surface is made of a bioplastic whose variable thickness generates a pattern, an image, images. Actually this long flexible band also recalls a film strip on which a few frames appear in succession. Rather than the result of shooting an image, these quasi-images are generated and slowly shaped: an imprint forms the image, the imprint of a electronic display device. Like a fossil from our own era, the counter-form of bare components (flat screen, cables, computer and its peripherals) is printed onto matter. But, image after image, this imprint disappears like the scale model of an open-pit mine being gradually buried. The process of shaping, or "unshaping" is thus depicted by the sequencing itself: it's the same image that's represented, but, frame by frame, literally merges with the media, like a video dissolve, but physical this time. And while this film strip isn't running through a projector, back lighting puts its patterns in motion: the light is unstable, its vibrations and other variations react to interferences originating from the recording of the exhibition space's residual energies. The membrane is not only attached to the ceiling, it is also connected to the building via a great number of sensors, their visible and hanging cables deployed like tentacles searching for food, for energy. Thus, the pipes and other colorful cables that make up the Centre Pompidou signature architecture are invested by these sensors which convert the various flows, activities, and traffic that circulate through the building into electricity. As a whole, this apparatus is directly plugged into the space, configuring an ecosystem in which the image, far from immaterial, is composed of and reacts to the different specific aspects of the situation. The image is no longer the simple reflection of a past reality; answering to a kind of potential media archeology, it appears today as the localized physical trace of a future past.