Compression ---the twitter book

Compression

---the twitter book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Jan, 2010

Sculpture

Photo paper 3mm x 483mm

Plexiglace 483mm x 160mm

Wood board 526mm x 100mm x 16mm

The information explosion age is also the age of compression. Facing too much information, we try to sum up, shorten, simplify everything ; in order to save time, to know more. But we always stop at the level of « knowing » (not as far as « understanding »). It seems like the illusion (misunderstanding, misapprehension) that we know so we understand.

Nowadays, the most typical example is twitter. One of its specificities is that every message has to be 140 characters long maximum, which enables the information to circulate faster and faster.

In October 2009, 2 American boys began to post classic books on twitter. Every famous booksum up into one sentence long which is of course 140 characters long maximum.

So I rewrite a book of Walter Benjamin ; « The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction », so that it can fit on twitter. Every page is just one sentence long which includes maximum 140 characters.

I compress the letters in every vertical row. so they turn into unreadable little black points

The infusion

Sculpture

05, 2009

Newspaper,

wood board

1.5m x 1.5m x 2.5m

In the article: « Photography or the writing of light »,

Jean Baudrillard compared « noisy photo » in the media as a constant « infusion »

which does not copy the reality but reproduce another world around us,

and inoculate us with its imposed meaning.

Not just the image is overloads by so many significations,

but also all the information.

It breaks into our lives to tell us the « reality », « catastrophes », « big events », etc.

In the time of explosion of information,

Did we know more about this world?

Or we just live in the “fiction” made by media.

Saturate memory

Image installation

05.2010

Tracing paper x 10

Digital photo tends to become <archives>

A new utopia so seems to settle down, that of the storage of all the family photos and of all the moments of the daily life, without loss and waste.

This excess of family memory, this dream<to photograph everything>, these fatasmes of <keep everything>, this passion <to store everything>, do not they lead to what Regine Robin called a saturated memory ?

----Irene Jonas<Portrait de famille au naturel>

Via tube

Via tube

11-12, 2009

Installation 1m x 1m x 1m

Carton tube

Wood board

Video projector

It’s via sunlight that we see the world.

In the age of web 2.0, it’s via light that we know the world, via the light in the optical fiber.We rely more and more on internet to know the outer world, as if we look « outside » through the tube of fiber. By this high speed circulation of information technique, it seems that we could find anything on line. But did we really know anything by internet?

In china, a proverb says: « People see the sky through tube ». It means we just see little and lose the rest. Did we do the same thing by internet?

Through the tube of fiber, we see the exact same point of this world, which make us feel that we get the whole world. In opposite,we lose the other parts of the world except that point.

Mirrors are inserted in every tube. The light of image get through the dispositive. The tubes rearrange the position of each fragment of light and recompose another image.