These days, the Arsenal, the center for contemporary art, looks like a science fiction film set. It has been transfigured into a sort of mysterious and dark lair, invested with both technological and artistic experiences. A world with a post-apocalyptic feel. This is the 5e International digital art biennial developed by the Elektra organization which has just started.
This year, East Asia is in the spotlight with, for example, the immersive installation Unfold by Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa. This one literally makes us tremble – the ground moves in interaction with the images and the sounds – in front of the immense spectacle of the transformation of the gases of the celestial universe into sparkling stars. A work produced using data provided by NASA and the European Space Agency.
At the Arsenal, guest curator, South Korean DooEun Choi, has brought together 18 works around the theme of metamorphosis, a theme that allows, among other things, to deal with the transformations that our societies are experiencing.
Who else should we notice?
After DIY furniture, self-service checkouts in stores, social media where content is made by users who have become unpaid employees, the time may have come for it. self-medicalization. It is in any case the subject of a work by artist Ahreum Lee entitledI + Care, a scary parody of a new kind of IKEA where you could buy self-care kits. Gone are the days of looking for a family doctor and the long waits in the hospital. You will soon be able to heal yourself. Imagine the savings the state could achieve!
Using a machine and software that follow the rhythm of the tides, Michel de Broin has created a work that recreates the construction and collapse of a sandcastle. Presented for the first time in Montreal, this surprising machine was unveiled in 2015 in Toronto in the premises of the BMO Project Space, located at the top of a skyscraper. A work that seems to tell us that technologies, whatever they are, are always outdated one day, always in a process of obsolescence – planned or not – which is totally inevitable.
The video LifeFORM by Herman Kolgen plunges us into a space where humans seem bombarded with information. To absorb all this, will it be necessary to become like sponges, to adopt an unbearable position of continual adaptability?
And it will also be necessary to explore the roomICU (Intensive Care Unit) by Bill Vorn, the portal Liminal by Louis-Philippe Rondeau, the machine Prosperity II by Samuel St-Aubin, a device that orders grains of rice in a manner worthy of minimal art …