The CIRCA center has been transformed into a strange, dreamlike place, a place of transformation of the banal into the poetic. This is not the first time that CIRCA has experienced a change of this kind. We can remember, among other things, the intervention of Maude Arès at the beginning of 2023.
When you enter CIRCA, you will find in this space similarities both with a documentation center and with a place of experimentation for an artist/scientist-alchemist…
The visitor will find old slides, vinyl records, compact discs, large reels of tape for magnetic tapes, photographs as well as books… But these various media are not preserved there with the usual precaution, but in ” ephemeral filing furniture.” In various basins, in a series of tanks containing a salty liquid, often bluish, containing substances used to make cyanotypes, but also sometimes Indian ink, these means of storing images and texts – what we call today in a reductive way information — seems strangely macerated. Deposits resembling mold, but which are in fact simply salt crystals, have grown on them, creating a sort of magical transfiguration.
So what happened? What disaster or strange experience is taking place in this place?
Transmutations
For his exhibition, Sébastien Cliche explains that he created a work which is inspired by “the submerged part of information, what we call “cold data” — cold data —, an expression used in the economics of data management to talk about the most massive part of the information which is not consulted on a daily basis, but which must nevertheless be managed, preserved on servers”.
Cliche reminds us that this data also serves as “material fueling artificial intelligence”. But we could also explain how they fuel commerce and the citizen surveillance system. Because despite the promises of dematerialization that were made by IT, this data is “in fact like a material” very concrete, stored on computer servers that are very virtual and not that private. This information, often containing our personal data, becomes valuable tools for many companies who transform it into new profitable information about us and society.
But don’t expect a simple illustration of a reflection on old or new technologies. Certainly, this exhibition will not be without mentioning all the promises not kept by information technologies. There was a time when the companies that sold us computers promised us fewer paper printouts and data kept for eternity or almost… Since then, we have become disillusioned. Among other things, we realized that the computer support was very fragile and that it was in fact much more precarious than the paper support.
But from these elements, Cliche has built a sort of “artistic fiction”, a “center for processing obsolete information” which is far from the defense of a critical approach to technology. The artist “sediments, crystallizes”, distils, transforms various information stored on these numerous current and ancient supports, in order to “filter an essence of information”, a concentrate, a sort of cultural broth. At the back of the gallery, he will regularly transfer the contents of these sedimentation tanks into containers… Cliche explains how his exhibition shows “a tension between, on the one hand, the support of information – the book, the disk, the computer server — and, on the other hand, the information as such, the content, the song, the story, the news, the statistics, the transcribed thought…”. “But,” he adds, “it’s the fate of the transformation of this information and the erasure of it that interests me. »
Thanks to this whole process, this information seems to be lost, dissolved, and nevertheless become the material that will allow the construction of something else that we will designate above all as… art.
Creative freedom
But how can we preserve this work which seems alive, in “continuous transformation, in perpetual becoming”? Which collectors or museums could buy such a work? “I have already worked with commercial galleries, among others in Toronto… I have nothing against the sale of works, obviously. I have not developed an anti-sale speech, against the art trade, but I have freed myself a lot of freedom thanks to the support of our network of artist centers and by not thinking in terms of sale, and therefore conservation. Everything for me can become creative material, I have no limits… But hey, if a museum is interested, we can sit down and chat [rires]. I write good grant applications and I teach, which to me is extremely important… All of this gives me a lot of creative freedom. »