Jean Cristofol, 2005

A.V.A.D. is a device that attempts to broaden the perceptual field of multimedia installations by introducing air as a third dimension, a third space, both tactile and intangible, which interacts with and interacts with the sonic and visual spaces. It goes without saying that the question of the device plays an essential role here; it is at the heart of the experimental approach.

We speak of a device from the moment the question of the artwork escapes the alternative in which it was classically trapped, between fetishism and idealism, object of contemplation and spiritual reality. For a long time, the artwork was conceived as a thing, a thing traversed or imbued with spirit. The mental thing. The device articulates a set of elements—technical, plastic, symbolic—into an articulated functional unity from which nothing can be removed, forgotten, or omitted without transforming the artistic reality. It consists of no longer thinking of the artwork as a thing, but as an experience, and of relating this experience to the complexity of the conditions that make it possible. It consists of thinking of the artwork as a field, in the sense that in physics we speak not only of corpuscles, of material elements lending themselves to the imaginary projection of something solid and dense that stands in the solidity of its own consistency, but as a space of variations endowed with determinate properties.

I would like to mention several examples of devices that seem likely to shed light on some of the issues at stake in my argument. They all involve the projection of video images and sound diffusion, and they are part of current events. The aim here is not to rank these examples, to compare their interest or quality. It is to show, through them, different ways of approaching the question of art. Each of these devices establishes a certain relationship with cinema and the darkened theater.

In cinema, there is a separation between the process of making and the process of showing. The former functions fully in the camera-editing relationship. The minimal moment is the shot as a temporal unit, a moment of duration. The heart of the process is editing as temporal composition, rhythm, and writing. This is what allows Chris Marker's “La Jetée” to be fully a film. The process of making is sufficiently detached from the process of showing to allow the film to exist in a certain way, independently of it. We can see it, at least as a kind of witness, on the editing table, or of course on television—that is to say, through another device, profoundly different from that of the movie theater. The latter is, of course, present from the outset, from the filming, during the editing, even before all that, in the writing, in the conception of the film, in an underlying, imaginary, conceptual, and technical way. It is constitutive of the imaginary of cinema. And, as has been said a thousand times about television, a film shown outside the screen and the darkened theater is not fully the film. But the separation objectively exists. The work is not the apparatus, at least not the apparatus of dissemination; it exists and is preserved independently of it, even if it exists for it, in this case, for the darkened theater.

In the case of devices like those of Tony Oursler, which fall essentially within the field of video and which feed on nostalgia for cinema, this separation between the apparatus of production and the apparatus of presentation is maintained to some extent, at least in the sense that the video “exists” outside the installation for which it was made, that it can technically be viewed without it, and that the mannequins receiving the projection are the countless variations of a generic idea. But the apparatus is no longer a general matrix, capable of receiving any projection whatsoever. The video was not only created with the installation in mind, but under specific conditions that are precisely and specifically related to that installation. Viewed outside of its context, the video loses all its meaning, from a purely visual standpoint. The piece is inseparable from the installation; it cannot exist without it. The installation is an integral part of the artwork. But this is only true because the way the work is received becomes paramount, decisive. For Oursler, video participates in the creation of a visual artwork that falls within the realm of sculpture. It fulfills functions related to the treatment of the surface of a volume, even going so far as to pursue a certain illusionism. The installation contributes to the existence of a sculpture that appears alive, that generates a certain atmosphere, to which the surrounding space contributes: the beam of the video projector(s), the sound emanating from it, and ambient noise.

The devices, etc., are not the focus. There is a theatricality to Tony Oursler's installations, which are all small-scale stagings carrying potential narratives. Strange figures, deformed and grotesque silhouettes, both endearing and menacing, give voice to whispers, slightly crackling murmurs, often distorted, attempting to tell a story that one wants to grasp by straining to hear.

The situation is already different in one of the pieces that Ann Hamilton presents at La Maison Rouge under the general title Phora. I will focus more specifically on the sound and video installation that occupies the largest room in the gallery. Here, a balance is sought between the projection of the image and the diffusion of sound, but it is played out in an ambivalent way, in a parallelism that generates a certain tension. There is no longer, strictly speaking, a screen, and the video projector, suspended approximately in the middle of the room, or rather at the point on the ceiling that could constitute one of the poles of an ellipse, rotates slowly on its axis, projecting onto the walls an image that shows, in macro, the endless progression of a pen leaving behind the irregular trail of a black ink stroke. The walls become a long page, a long expanse, on which the hesitant and imperfect trace of a writing premise unfolds tirelessly. This circular movement surrounds us, scattered spectators, as if in a square around which the wheel of a vertical moped would obstinately turn clockwise. This movement alone, a beam of light that defines the area of ​​our presence, transforms the darkened room into a mental agora. It's no longer exactly a dark room, since the movement and refraction of the projection's beam of light illuminate the space. In the shifting light, the loudspeakers appear, fixed to the ends of five long rods that also rotate, but in the opposite direction, like slender propellers above our heads. They diffuse a full, somewhat monotonous vibration, like the hum or buzz of insects, the barely articulated songs murmured by closed or half-open mouths. The voice and speech are thus metaphorical before they are narrative, and the act of narration itself takes on the value of a metaphor. There is indeed something here that belongs to the realm of cinematic memory and history, but displaced into a form of rhythmic spatial and temporal montage, to which image and sound contribute separately, physically of course, but above all symbolically (writing – voice, space – time, image – sound) in a reciprocal echo and a stretching. An evocation of a state prior to speech, or of the impossible desire for speech. Or something that observes the moment when language yields to the unspeakable and remains only as a tension, a bridge over silence. The apparatus is no longer the matrix for the dissemination of a work, even if it were necessary for the work's existence; it participates in the articulation of the symbolic elements that constitute the work itself.

In this series, AVAD occupies the next position, that of a work that remains contained within the spatial unity through which it presents itself, as an environment, to the viewer. In the previous examples, while the devices contributed to the creation of meaning, they carried and questioned a meaning that pertained to language, narrative, or metaphor. But here, it is the device itself that creates the work, functioning as a system that generates the conditions for an experience. And it is primarily space that is at issue here, its modalities, its modularity, the modulations it allows. It is space that creates meaning, as a sensory matrix and repository of autonomy, and the metaphorical or external elements that contribute their symbolic meaning remain secondary. They are only valuable insofar as they can be brought into play within the mechanical relationship that the device establishes, insofar as they can find a place within it. In a certain sense, they function like the sound and visual content that AVAD reprocesses and transforms: raw material to be metamorphosed.

AVAD is not, strictly speaking, an installation in the usual sense of the term. AVAD is a large magic box. It is a machine, or a device, whose elements are all articulated, linked by the laws that govern them. We are invited to enter this device and move through a completely artificial environment. There, in this paradoxical interiority, we encounter a landscape, a sonic and visual world resulting from a process of synthesis, until we find ourselves within the circle of a kind of wind-making machine. Before us, the bluish horizon of a field of images stretches to infinity; around us, theThe development of a soundscape, and the sensation on our bodies of air reacting to our movements, shifting with our body's position, confronts us with the strangeness of an artificial wind whose direction and intensity we can control, a wind that responds to us.

At first glance, this might seem like an attempt to revive the dream of entering a virtual space, a desire to pave the way for an immersive system that would physically plunge us into a synthetic world, something that would avoid the cumbersome equipment—headsets, sensor-equipped gloves, etc.—that enjoyed a certain vogue a few years ago. But it's not exactly that. We are not faced with prosthetic extensions of our bodies, but rather with an environment, a space for wandering. And the environment in which we find ourselves doesn't aspire to any “realism,” it offers us no illusions, it doesn't seek to draw us into the abstraction of a virtual world by giving us the feeling that it's the “real” world. We find ourselves, in a certain way, in a completely real world. The landscape into which AVAD leads us is nothing like a patch of countryside, an English garden, or a fantasy world. It is produced by the repurposing and processing of information that mass media continuously disseminate, by the discretization and synthesis of the flows that actually surround us. It filters what circulates within the directional channels of the communication society. An inexhaustible magma of signs and forms flows and radiates, a calibrated current of pre-processed, assimilated, adjusted, and homogenized visual and auditory values.

There is a fluid and volatile substance here, possessing a certain quality regardless of its content, indifferent to any content whatsoever. A bath. AVAD can be conceived as a machine that feeds on this substance, transforming, processing, or reprocessing it in real time, much like recycling waste. AVAD grafts itself onto the continuous loss of informational matter, its neutral and amorphous dissipation. It is an echo chamber, a receptacle. The aim here is not to engage in reflection on what the media convey, on what they say or claim to say. Taking McLuhan's famous formula, “the medium is the message,” literally at face value, the aim is to consider information flows as sources of energy and sensations, as generators of an environment in which we are immersed and which we can reappropriate to extract from it a transformed, metamorphosed, poeticized substance. Transformed into particles, granularized, sounds and images undergo a process that aims to make them the concrete elements of our perception. The goal is to objectify them in a process of materialization, to consider them as things, endowed with the properties of any other thing, that can be located in space, moved, manipulated. Objects capable of reacting to the physical forces exerted upon them.

The use of air follows the same logic, because it is a way of reaching us, because it has the property of being both material and impalpable, invisible and perceptible to the touch. It immediately engages the feeling of our physical presence. Here, air participates in a life of space; it symbolically refers to the wind as well as to breathing, to the exteriority of the landscape as well as to the intimacy of the body. But above all, it becomes a medium in its own right, treated in the same way as images and sounds, the vehicle for a form of writing and a game of command. Through it, the action exerted on image-objects corresponds to what we directly feel on our skin.

There is a whole tradition of aesthetics that has examined the properties of our senses, their hierarchy, their greater or lesser degree of abstraction, their greater or lesser capacity to engage thought, in the same way that it was built upon the foundation of the divide between body and mind, matter and idea, form and content. Not only have we placed sight and hearing above the other senses, but we have separated and specialized them. The specificity of our relationship to writing is partly rooted in this perspective, in contrast to the way in which ideographic writing can simultaneously play out, as corresponding levels, the visual, auditory, and semantic dimensions.

The boundaries that distinguish artistic disciplines are not immune to this cultural division of our ways of feeling, and the way these boundaries are being questioned and challenged today inevitably calls for a new way of thinking about the forms of our perception. The open field of what we call the “Multimedia” is part of these transformations. Yet this commonly accepted expression, which has become traditional and codifies usage, seems unfortunate to me, for at least two reasons: the first is that it operates by addition, merely denoting the possibility of simultaneously playing sound, image, and text, without considering that the specificity of these devices lies not in this addition but in the modality of the links that allow non-linear movement between the elements; the second is that the articulation between sound, visual, and textual elements occurs at a secondary level of digital programming. This programming develops its own relevance, establishing a specific level of logical activity as well as of the imagination. The variations that affect the orientation and intensity of the pulsed air in AVAD stem from this programming work and use the same software used to spatialize sounds.

This is precisely the second difference with what immersion in the illusion of a virtual landscape might be. Here, the sounds, images, and movements of the pulsed air do not combine to reinforce an effect of reality. They exist autonomously, as distinct dimensions, endowed with their own identity, their own status as visual, auditory, or tactile objects. The sound is not there to enhance the realistic impact of the image, nor is the image there to justify the sensation of the airflow. It is the airflow, provoked and directed by our movements, that acts upon the images, as if they were exposed to the wind, shaken, tossed, displaced, yet resistant to this force acting upon them, returning to their original positions. There is no illusion in these movements, but rather the triggering of a chain of cause and effect, of air on image, of image on sound, whose determinism is not achieved through reciprocal contact, but through belonging to the same space, the same orientational structure, of which we are objectively a part, and in which we participate through our position on the moving plane that functions as an interface. Space tends to materialize and become an active field that determines the behavior of perceived objects, while the mechanisms dematerialize into functions of writing and programming.

This space is no longer merely a neutral and passive dimension in which things coexist, but a matrix that connects and generates the various events we perceive. Visual, auditory, and tactile events respond to one another in a chain of reactions, a succession of transformations, serial effects that in turn become autonomous, independent of our actions, of our presence on the interface. The AVAD machine possesses a memory; it develops repetitive behaviors, interprets and transforms the information we emit, and generates sequences through which the gap in relation to our presence is manifested once again, revealing the existence of a temporality specific to the device, an autonomy. The sum of these gaps—between the different sensory dimensions that contribute to the environment, between the particular nature of AVAD's informational landscape and the illusionistic notion of landscape, between our interaction with the device and its autonomy—profoundly shapes both the notion of immersion and that of presence. It helps define the specific role of the spectator who activates the device, without whom nothing would happen, and who therefore constitutes an indispensable element in the chain of interferences implemented within it, who is part of the system like one of its cogs. The spectator is never in a position of control or capture, never caught in a game of illusion, never the manipulated manipulator that interactivity often presents.

For a long time, we could imagine the space we live in as the continuous surface of an essentially object-based and passive world. We, amidst the things that surround us, which we can contemplate, which we must work, transform, master, and subjugate. Space as the open dimension of our power, as the proposed field of our expansion. We, the sole possessors of the power to think, casting our gaze upon a world of things. This world has become terribly complex. It has ceaselessly dematerialized on one hand and materialized on the other. The relationships between things have become more important than the things themselves, energy fields more decisive than objects. Invisible movements populate what we believed to be emptiness, animate our screens, make our cell phones vibrate, and read our car license plates. Our language circulates and chatters through the infinite tubes of information channels. Our thought itself fragments into functions simulated by minute electronic circuits. The space in which we live plays with the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the material and the intelligible. It is agitated by turbulence, traversed by waves, and permeated by flows. We are no longer in the middle of nothing; we circulate within a networked universe.

AVAD seeks to grasp the paradox of positioning itself somewhere within this shifting landscape, of establishing a “somewhere” there. Certainly not a center, a citadel, or a belvedere. Just enough space to establish the fixity of a provisional “here” where our presence is inscribed, a “here” that depends exclusively on our presence. The notion of fixity is, moreover, only partially justified. Relative, it is immediately called into question. The small platform offered to us as a temporary station is simultaneously a small theater. And we can also choose to remain within the realm of circulation, to circle around it, to observe the one who ventures onto the platform of interaction, to adopt a contemplative attitude. The perspective is therefore twofold, partially reversible, but the environment only comes alive when someone makes their presence known, steps onto the platform, enters the playing area. The whole thing is part of a scenography that includes the spectator as an integral element of the installation. Then, the elements of the installation become the elements of a setting that only ever reflects us back to ourselves.

Jean Cristofol, april 2005