Edito⎜Chronique(s) of a Digital Art Biennale

Last month saw the opening of the 3rd Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques organized by Chroniques. Spread over Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Avignon, Arles and Istres, exhibitions, workshops, performances and concerts take place over three teeming months. One of the highlights of digital arts and culture in the south of France, The Bienniale offers a multidisciplinary program on the theme of pleasure. From now until January 19, 2025, all generations and all tastes in art will be satisfied. Here’s a look back at our visit to Marseille and Aix-en-Provence.

Cover: Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques 2024 📸 Gregoire Edouard

Pleasure, an ambitious and subversive theme?

Since Mathieu Vabre, artistic director of the Biennale, invites Michel Foucault in his editorial to introduce this event, let’s follow him on this bold step. His History of sexuality, the philosopher had thought of it in six volumes. As with all projects, three were published during his lifetime and the last posthumously. Of course, there’s more to pleasure than sexuality. However, recalling Foucault’s work, and thus sexuality, is an interesting way to travel through this biennial, as the philosopher talks about the body. And there’s a lot of talk about it in these digital imaginary worlds.

Think of sexuality and you’ll soon come to think of the body, of the forbidden, of repression, of domination – that which we undergo, as well as that which we impose -. Let’s look at domination, and here comes politics, surveillance, the subveillance. To understand this last concept, I invite you to read this synthesis of the work of Camille Alloing Professor at UQAM, a specialist in issues of influence and digital communication. When politics takes center stage, it’s all about power in the backyard and bio-power in the garden.

The artists of the Biennale 2024/2025 are inviting us to question, rethink, deconstruct and rebuild with them.

Compelled pleasure, chosen pleasure, voyeur or actor ?

Let’s begin our digital journey at Marseille’s Friche de la Belle de Mai, with Ito Meikyū by Boris Labbé (Venice Immersive Grand Prix). Is it still necessary to introduce this major artist for his mastery of hybridity? No doubt, and we’re sure that new readers will join us. Born in 1987, Boris studied at the École supérieure d’art des Pyrénées (Tarbes). He continues his training at the École de cinéma d’animation d’Angoulême until 2011. After that, the artist took up a number of residencies, including at Residenza Farnese (Medicis XR Residency, Villa Medicis 2022) and Les Ailleurs, Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles 2021 for this project.

The immersive experience begins long before the helmet is placed on your head. You discover books, interwoven words; little things that may or may not give you pleasure. You wander around an installation. Boris comes from an animation background. 

He observes our own movements, as if we were part of his work. And you adjust the headset. In a fraction of a second, you become an observer-participant in scenes of daily life in ancient Japan. Following a random thread, you make your way through an aesthetic labyrinth. As you bend over, puddles open onto other worlds. The walls of this theater come alive.

Do you feel like a voyeur or an actor? You make your own choices of routes and postures in this experimental theater.

Lawful or guilty pleasure ?

At the Musée des Tapisseries in Aix-en-Provence, Robbie Cooper, a british artist presents Immersion. His project: to record the expressions of people watching TV, playing video games or using the Internet. Robbie Cooper captures these people of all ages in close-up, immersed in various digital media. Action-reaction. The participants’ intense reactions are shown on a large screen. We, the audience, react with our own emotions. This sort of mirror effect reflects our own use of digital technology. Guilty pleasures? In this crypt of the former Palais de l’Archevêché, these vaults that bring us so close together, can’t we wonder who’s watching and who’s doing what ?

It’s at the espace culturel départemental, in Aix-en-Provence, that you’ll discover the work of Ethel Lilienfeld, EMI. From the ateliers de Sèvres to Le Fresnoy, this young artist has enjoyed a string of residencies and awards. The body is central to her work. Questions of gender, aesthetic codes, submission, wanting to be loved at all costs, all are posed in this short film mixing reality and Artificial Intelligence. With great humility, Ethel recounts EMI for Near Death Experience. How far are we prepared to please our friendings? Of the mukbang that could kill us? Filters that will break the encounter in real life ?

From fantasy to shared pleasure ?

It’s at Les Méjanes – Bibliothèque, archives Michel-Voyelle that you’ll discover The Museum of Dating by Valentina Peri. Art historian, anthropologist, artist, curator, lecturer, there’s no shortage of terms to describe Valentina’s multiple activities. But there’s another word that defines her: collector. For several years now, she has been collecting rare or forgotten items relating to love encounters. She has turned this corpus into a museum showing the Anthropocene of lovemaking and sexual encounters. From the regional daily press, to digital applications, scramblers and computer dating through the documentary on Joan Ball.

Valentina draws emotional, economic, political and even geo-political threads from the encounter. From this point of view, in The Museum of Dating, the approach to the encounter, shows us the extent to which it can be thought of as a total social fact as described by the sociologist Marcel Mauss. Fait social total being understood as a phenomenon that affects all individual and collective entities in society in a condensed time sequence. Thanks to its total scope, this social fact can bring about a movement in society.

A po(é)litique pleasure ?

The Musée du Pavillon Vendôme in Aix-en-Provence offers a subtle setting for Charnelles Interbioformae, the work of Yosra Mojtahedi who is just as much so. Born in 1986 in Tehran (Iran), Yosra arrived in France 10 years ago. A moment of discovery both within and without. Learning a language, a culture, another vision of art, while reexamining one’s native cognitive biases put to the test as one’s own body is displaced. A graduate of Le Fresnoy, Yosra won the ADAGP’s Prix révélation d’art numérique et d’art vidéo in 2020.

Through her work in drawing, engraving, sculpture and robotics, Yosra blends the human body with its environment. Black is her signature color, but isn’t there a new black today? In this respect, isn’t Yosra Mojtahedi the total social fact incarnate? Take the time to look at her works, walk around them, touch them, smell and feel them. Yosra offers us an immersive world in which a fragment of the human body becomes plant or mineral. Everything is intertwined in a poetic and political thought. Yosra gives us material to think about a decompartmentalized world.

Find all the artists listed and more at the Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques until January 19, 2025. All practical information, venues, exhibitions, events, prices can be found on the dedicated website.

To continue with Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques

Chroniques 2024 – First edition of the Marché des Imaginaires Numériques (MIN): Marseille, European digital crossroads, by Adrien Cornelissen