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Performance of Lawrence Malstaf at the City of the Book as part of "Chronicles. Biennale of digital imaginaries "in Aix and Marseille. Siegfried Forster / RFI

Jules Vernes made us travel to the center of the Earth, George Orwell at the center of our nightmares, and each time, technology had a role to play. The advent of the digital world upsets our bearings and our imaginations. The first edition of "Chronicles. Biennale des imaginaires numériques "is spreading in 18 locations in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, in the south of France. It gives some forty international artists the opportunity to explore and express their digital imagination and share it with us.

They look fascinated, almost hypnotized by this monumental work that spits out lights and electronic sounds while inventing a new visual language. We are in front of a shopping center in the heart of Aix-en-Provence. Children first dare to touch this monolith, which is rightly touted as interactive by the Canadian artist Daniel Iregui. Young people of 5, 8 or 10 years old show adults how to do it before trying together and in an impassive way to fiddle the surface and sweep the screen to tame the bright and convulsive signs of this work called Control No Control .

" Today, we live in an all-digital world that shapes our imaginations, that diffracts our spaces and our bodies and that transforms our relationships to the world and to others," explains Mathieu Vabre, one of the two directors of Chroniques , the new Biennale of digital imaginaries in Aix and Marseille. It's a whole culture that is emerging and being questioned here. "

The impact of digital on our imaginations

In this ever-accelerating digital world, where one novelty chases the other and the horizons multiply, does one still have time to build one's imagination? For Mehdi Benboubakeur, General Manager of Printemps numérique in Montreal, whose latest edition attracted 750,000 people, his only certainty is that " the man must remain in the center ". Not easy when you know that the upheavals, " with the digital, it happens extremely fast. We do not have time to look at the impact of these digital practices on our lives. How can one have an imaginary when one does not have time to live already what is happening ? "

What are the pressures on our bodies and minds? The transdisciplinary artist Rocio Berenguer speaks in his show Ergonomics of an "urban body", a "cyborg-body", a result of an increasingly normative and intrusive world. For that, it seems almost natural that the Flemish artist Lawrence Malstaf presents us to the City of the book in some way the incompressible part of the human being: three performers find themselves locked up in transparent plastic bags whose air is progressively took of. A performance mounted in triptych like the three crosses planted in Golgotha.

Put simple things together

He describes himself as a scenographer, lighting designer and visual artist of air, light and matter. In the Chapel (desecrated) of the visitation in Aix, Guillaume Cousin fires the cannon to surround us with the Silence of the particles . Above the altar, a large smoke gun expels its particles and makes us feel the emptiness that surrounds us. The digital imagination is at the heart of the action: " It allows to go very far in the writing of the score, in the way this machine moves, interacts, loops ... it gives the instruction, directs the movement it has a central part which is that of the brain. "

The German Robert Henke, artist-musician-plastic artist of electronic music, has fun to enthuse the crowds with non-existent things. The effect of its geometric and sonic distortions lies in the slowness of our organs of perception: " We see things that in reality do not exist, because the eye reacts very slowly to changes. For his performance as a laser and digital sound, Lights III , he claims more artistic than technological bias: " The imagination generated by the computer is revealed at home in the fact that I put things very simple together. It's not important that I project 50,000 polygons per second. The only important thing is if I feel something. At home, it works, otherwise, I would not, and the public also works, otherwise, no one would come ... [laughs]

The digital revolution, does it exist ?

Pushing our imagination towards its paradoxes also seems to be the credo of the artist Florian Schönerstedt. Like a work of art in the museum, he put a square meter of cobblestones, symbols of the revolution, on a pedestal. Next door, it offers visitors a virtual experience called Revolution m2 . One by one, he scanned all the pavers of the square meter to make them available to his guinea pigs equipped with virtual reality headsets. " In the end, people see someone interact with the symbol of revolution, but we see it disembodied, tending to something else. And this other thing is the question of the digital revolution that I'm trying to raise. What is she bringing and where do we go with that ? Above all : is there a digital revolution ? Is it really a revolution ? "

Undeniably, our modern condition has greatly evolved with the digital society. For Mathieu Vabre, our view of the world has changed from horizontal to vertical: " With the perception of territory through Google Earth, drones, satellites, we are in a position of levitation, observing the world. Today, we find ourselves in space thanks to these technologies. We are more and more in a position of vertical observation where our gaze goes daily from our horizontal natural vision to a vertical look from above. "

"The silence of the particles", Guillaume Cousin in the Chapel of the visitation in the frame of "Chroniques. Biennale of digital imaginaries "in Aix and Marseille. Siegfried Forster / RFI

A sunset on Mars

What if we did not only reverse our lives and our visions, but changed our planet? At the Friche La Belle de Mai in Marseille, Félicie d'Estienne d'Orves subjugates us with an extra-planetary and incredibly poetic experience, a sunset seen from the planet Mars, recorded thanks to the small robots sent to the red planet: " This sunset is very similar to ours, except that the colors are reversed. When the sun approaches the horizon, there is a blue effect around the sun which will deteriorate towards the red ... There is this idea of ​​continuum between this illusion of sunset - which does not go down more on Mars than on Earth - and this idea : in what horizon can we project today ? The horizon is something we perceive, but it is also an optical illusion. "

For her, the digital world makes it possible to look at other visions like other planets: " What I find interesting in the digital world is how one can be here and now in one's body, in a specific place, and at the same time projecting his mind into other space-times. "

The canvas has no traces

Less romantic, but also striking is the installation of Jean-Benoît Lallemant. The painter and art historian presents a simple monochrome surface. Before our eyes, this linen cloth will be transformed into a battlefield. A digital mechanism behind the chassis sends small peaks on the canvas, and this each time when there are airstrikes of US drones in Wasiristan and Yemen. Thus, he denounces the increasingly larger gap between the soldier and his target, and between the event and the public: " The canvas has no traces, has no impact, just like the soldier who is never going to be hit. It is also the image of public opinion that will never be impacted by these shocking images. With a simple canvas of painting, the artist makes ingeniously visible this cyberwar supposed to remain hidden.

The digitization of digitized and automated wars is at the center of Alain Josseau's computer installation, Automatique War. " The main idea was to create a sci-fi scenario where humans would have completely disappeared from the Earth and there would only be machines left. But strangely, if there are only machines left on Earth, they will continue to wage war, by automatic machines. " And as a kind of nostalgia for humans, we even see a news broadcast: " There are journalists who speak, but they are avatars, animated photographs. Everything is wrong in this newspaper : the studio, the journalists ... "

Where is today the space of freedom and dreams ?

" In the exhibition, there is a fairly important axis on the militarization of these tools that serve to observe the planet, notes Mathieu Vabre. It is true, this dream of flight that was a condition of human freedom - the sky was this space of freedom and dream - today, it is also colonized by these tools. "

Meanwhile, Moussa Sarr realized his dream: to build a real flying carpet, Rising Carpet , a prayer mat merged with four small drones and piloted with a remote control. " I like to say it's the first real flying carpet in the world. The idea was to replace magic with new technologies to make a dream possible. I did not take a drone that raises a carpet. I created a hybrid object, a mix between a carpet and a drone. "

Her work speaks of both spiritual elevation and the potential threat generated by innovations: " If I give the remote control to a bad person, it could make a carnage with this carpet. " Otherwise, he willingly admits to love the idea of ​​the digital imaginary, " because we do not know where the limits are. We must always test, evolve, move forward, but knowing what has been done before, we can not advance like that, posed. "

See further to the future

An opinion and enthusiasm shared by Alain Thibault, who came from Canada to share with Aix and Marseille festival-goers his experiences as artistic director of the Elektra Festival and the International Biennial of Digital Arts in Montreal: " I think that we live in an era still exciting. The digital imagination makes us see a little further towards the future. We started from the electronic arts to digital arts, and now we're talking a little more about digital contemporary art. There is something really interesting happening at this level. "

Read also: Hiroaki Umeda, the art of movement and the digital imagination , rfi, 11/11/2018

► Chronicles. Biennial digital imaginary, until December 15, in Marseille and Aix-en-Provence.