A pat on the back here, a trip there: our relationship with technology has always been based on this kind of ambivalence. The exhibition Terms of use offered by the Phi Foundation illustrates this abundantly. The fifteen artists brought together by curators Daniel Fiset and Cheryl Sim explore the power, both infinite and limited, of technological tools. If videoconferences (Zoom and company) bring us closer, they will never replace a meeting in the flesh.
As Daniel Fiset writes in the presentation text, Terms of use is about “how we use [la technologie] and how it uses us”. Virtual reality and augmented reality projects, 3D prints and other digital products, but not only, animate the two usual buildings at the foundation of Old Montreal.
With The Left Space, Brendan Fernandes reproduces the paradoxical reality of virtuality. First a choreography for six dancers performed on the Zoom platform during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project was revived in public during the Nuit blanche 2023. The video on display documents the event and is intended to be a new iteration of this work based on movements performed in front of web cameras.
“I wondered how to bring bodies together, put them in contact. The Zoom grid is a space that allows us to celebrate and be together,” says the Canadian artist. In 2020, this celebration didn’t show everything, however, like the office chairs on which the dancers perform. The 2023 recovery is more inclusive. “The work is about being supervisible and invisible. There is what we see in this space [réel] and what survives in virtual space. »
Several of the 18 exhibited works were created for the occasion or shortly before. This is what makes Cheryl Sim say that the exhibition has made it possible to “achieve things that artists dream of”.Ludmila Steckelberg, who works under the pseudo VahMirè, does not hide it. “It’s really a dream, it’s the best of my life,” says the Brazilian-born Montrealer about the installation Of[faroucher]produced between 2019 and 2023. Composed of a video projection, a virtual reality station, 3D sculptures and an image printed on fabric, the work features the artist’s avatar in a relationship of love-hate with the city — “a sense of belonging and alienation,” writes Daniel Fiset.
Identity conditions
There is a lot of question of identity in Terms of use. If VahMirè inscribes his “immigrant body” – these are his words – in his host city, other artists like Chun Hua Catherine Dong or Helena Martin Franco use technology to reconnect with cultures (or families) that have become distant with immigration. The first multiplies the virtual spaces — and the works rich in detail and color —, the second is projected into an installation imbued with affection.
For the indigenous communities, or at least for the collective Nation to Nation, a chat software made it possible to affirm their existence as distinct people(s). Long before the current social networks: the project CyberPowPowreactivated for the occasion, operated between 1997 and 2004. “We understood that it was better to occupy the digital space than to reject non-traditional technologies”, comments Skawennati, of Mohawk origin, now well known for his avatars qualified as “machinimage”.
Real or virtual, authentic or fabricated, identity is at the heart of two works critical of digital technologies, those of Francisco González-Rosas and Ilana Yacine Harris-Babou. To the excesses and narrative complexity of the first — the work Dismembered Bindings (2023) evokes notions of gender in a multitude of media — the second opposes the effectiveness of Decision Fatigue (2020). Caricatural, the short video features a woman whose makeup tutorial is based on sometimes surprising products, such as… Cheetos. And points to realities (obsession with appearance, social pressure, manipulation) that are spreading online like viruses.
This feminist and feminine statement seems linked to the oldest piece in the exhibition, Technology/Transformation: wonder woman (1978-1979), by Dara Birnbaum. It is not because the technology in vogue gives a woman superpowers that it frees her from her image, seems to say the New York artist.
“Technology forces us to rethink how we represent ourselves. It’s a theme, implicitly,” observes Daniel Fiset, evoking the large number of artists who identify as women, queers or people of color. “Technology, he continues, allows things which, in terms of representation in physical space, are difficult, even impossible. »
Very rare exhibition of the Phi Foundation including artists from here (nine, in all), Terms of use is not just a political demonstration. At least, the very zen Screen lights under a moonless sky, part 01 (2023), by Montrealer Shanie Tomassini, invites us to meditate on technological decay. The installation features 15 cell phones, in incense, intended to burn during the exhibition. Soothing scents announced.