62.161.153.125 confronts two spaces, the local and the global through the public of the exhibition and the player / internet user who experiments the game card from his personal computer. This installation is the result of a work within the research group, Nexus, directed by Laetitia Delafontaine, Gregory Niel, Gianni Gastaldi and Patrice Maniglier. This group had as object of study the film Elephant by Gus Van Sant through the notion of global and local. I proposed to create a FPS (First Person Shooter) type game server that takes up the characteristics of the exhibition gallery.

Thus, one could apprehend this game both in its local form (since four game stations were placed in the gallery) and also through a global access via the game server. It is the IP address of this server that gave the name of this interactive installation, 62.161.153.125.

This installation puts in scene a dematerialization of the object or the place of art, this network device does not produce a disappearance of this object, but on the contrary, it confers him a ubiquity. Certainly, the work becomes in some way impalpable, because the visitor has recourse to an interface to experiment it, but it becomes rather problematic to locate it. Is it in the interface, in the game station that the spectator manipulates? Yes, but not only, it also resides in this server, hidden from the public, but present in the art center, which centralizes and propagates the game information. By extension, the work is also located in all the connections that transmit the information to the players and also in the material that the remote Internet user uses to play.

This sound installation unfolds visually in three forms or three times: a silkscreen of a painting by François Morellet (the reference from a photocopy of a book), the analysis of the mathematical function at work in the process of creating the painting and its transcription into computer language synchronized with sound.

The function written with the help of a stencil is the result of a collaboration with the philosopher and mathematician Gianni Gastaldi, it illustrates in an abstract way the work without taking into account a unit to give a scale: one can thus use it to reproduce this drawing by varying its dimensions.

The program operates by transduction, synchronizing the process of creating the painting (in a loop) with a bass sound.

Thus the length of the sound determines the execution time of the painting and the spaces between the dashes determine the silence time between each reading of the bass sound. The program respects François Morellet’s thought that the process is more important than the result, this aspect inherent to generative art is present in most of my pieces.

More than a quotation, this work is for me a tribute to Morellet and his methodology. Indeed, my work consists in fixing a framework and observing the evolution of the elements of the representation that have become independent.

This edition is the result of a work process specific to Generative Art.
Generative art is a generally digital artistic creation based on algorithms to conceive works that generate themselves and/or are not determined in advance. The representation is built according to the intervention of a chance (mathematical probabilities, randomness of the game, conditions determined by human or natural activities…) or of the action of the spectators. The experimentation in a generative work is similar to that which could make a scientist: it is a question of fixing a framework, a protocol in which an external element is going to intervene, is going to determine the representation at the artist’s or the result – positive or negative – of the experiment at the scientist.

The starting point or protocol of this project is the creation of a discussion group on a social network, Facebook, a group of sixty and a member is constituted, these people coming from different horizons are invited to apprehend each other through the insult. The result of these exchanges is published in this work without any form of censorship or correction.

It is thus a question of creating asociability on a support which promises us the opposite, how a Net surfer, accustomed to exchange in a consensual way or to write in a way to allure the greatest number of reader, will adopt this aggressive posture?

The result is that in the majority of cases, Internet users use the geographical affiliation of their protagonists’ surnames to attack them on their origins. The posture of the artist is cynical, the algorithm supposed to find profiles of users having affinities with mine is used to constitute a macro-population of malicious people. A tool that carries a modern vision of a network, making ideas circulate faster, allowing to meet interesting people sees its function reversed: creating vacuity and animosity.

The constitution of this collection was made difficult by the fact that the authority of Facebook, through its administrators, has deleted a number of comments and user profiles, this action is visible in Correspondence through the mention “deleted message”.