Tag: generative video

The Unknown

Video, 4K, 2ch sound, 20’, direction and music Thierry Fournier, 2022
Created in the frame of the group show Supplementary Elements, Université de Strasbourg, 2022, curator Emeline Dufrennoy

The video The Unknownexplores the ideologies conveyed by the market economy on science and research, particularly through image banks.

A generative programme endlessly loops stock videos evoking science: laboratories, researchers, etc. Their smooth, interchangeable, technicist and falsely inclusive aesthetic could just as easily apply to companies or start-ups. These images, stripped of reality and any conflict, convey an ideology of progress, efficiency and performance. The film superimposes sentences that question these videos. What is the impact of these images? How do they contribute to a collective imagination of science and society’s expectations?

The Unknown gave also rise to an installation: L’Insu

The Unknown was created in 2022 for the exhibition Supplementary Elements at the University of Strasbourg, curated by Emeline Dufrennoy. Borrowing from the codes of advertising, the installation of the work in Strasbourg, on a giant LED screen in a shop window, opposite the tramway and at the foot of the Doctoral School, reinforces the public dimension of this questioning.

Ungrave

Installation: 65 inch LCD screen, USB key, wood, video (1080p, 14h), 195 x 110 x 8 cm, 2020-2025

On the floor, a very large screen recreates the image of a gravestone whose inscriptions are constantly being rewritten, as if it were still alive. His first name, dates and epitaph are constantly being erased and rewritten, often very quickly and incompletely.

While the dead are, by definition, those who will never respond again, Grave establishes the fiction of a zombie death, perverted by technology, which continues to bug ad vitam æternam, constantly questioning its life and the best way to summarise it.

The project ironically evokes the transhumanist ideology of unlimited rewriting of life, where anything would always be possible, even after death. It is also a vision of hell, where souls would continue to wander without ever ending or finding peace.

The name on the gravestone alternates between John and Jane Doe, a term used in English-speaking countries for unknown buried persons. The date of death varies constantly, but the date of birth is always 2020, the date the work was originally created.

Produced with the support of Biennale Chroniques, 2020