Des attentions — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 18 → March 31, 2019

Des attentions — Le Crédac, Ivry Le Crédac propose une fois de plus, avec Des attentions, une exposition tout en subtilité qui nous projette, à travers des thématiques variées surgissant au détour d’un regard, d’une plongée succincte au cœur de dispositifs, dans des enjeux essentiels d’une société où le virtuel se fait l’écho secret de tendances qui nous modèlent.

Among the busy crowds depicted in some of the Renaissance paintings, still figures give the viewer a knowing look, pointing with their index finger to the hectic heart of the scene. The gesture calls out, redirects and reinforces our attention, perhaps lost in the agitation or by the subtlety of the situation. Drawn in the margins of ancient manuscripts and then transformed into a typographical sign, the small hand with its straight forefinger (manicle or digit) is also used to point out a passage whose reading deserves a particular attention. Recurrent as an advertisement, it then appears in commercial ads, before indicating on our screens the hovering of hypertext links. The index finger highlights a content or a function that can be activated by a click. Then, our own hand has finally supplanted the icon, skimming directly the touch screen to follow the tracks, where the navigational history will reveal the hunts, trophies, and sometimes wanderings. This is evidenced by the fingerprints scanned by Nicolás Lamas on extinct Ipads (Blind gestures). These multiple spawnings draw routes guided by interest or astonishment, drifting towards a stroll that is sometimes fertile.

In line with an “ecology of attention” as defined by Yves Citton in 2014, the exhibition des attentions wonders: “what are we allowing to go through (or not) through us” within the digital environment we are living in? Emancipated from the imperatives of a commercial communication that would require their works an unequivocal readability, the ten artists raise a fluctuating and vagabond attention, freed from a technological determinism and a capitalizable standardization. Rather than a permanent state of alert which requires immediate responsiveness and reactivity, they opt for a stealthy and flexible watch. Thus, in front of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s holograms (2013), one has to be as patient as mobile to detect the presence of camouflaged insects in the branches: embrace their strategy of clandestinity and discretion, not to sacrifice the whole for the figure, nor the background for the foreground. In a word, pay attention to the context and the milieu; to the environment rather than the signal.

The capitalist economy, the neurosciences, the media and marketing first seek to evaluate and quantify attention in terms of performance or resources; in particular to the “available human brain time” that can be enslaved to the flow of information, entertainment and consumption. The inexploitable inattention is relegated to the side of the pathology or the failure. On the other hand, the art field works to qualify, exercise and raise awareness of perception through games of reframing, focusing and resolution; and this for sometimes critical purposes, as in Antoni Muntadas’ video Slogans (1987), where advertising messages such as “we promise you a captive audience” are gradually being crumbled. In reverse to this hold, Raymond Hains fully assumes an “emancipatory and exploratory distraction”, muzzling coïncidences in coïncidences, polysemies in homophonies, annotated readings in found objects, weaving a personal “kind of Web”. Since 1998, he has photographed the mosaic of windows opened on his computer screen, bringing together figures, places and books through associations, meaning shifts and word games (Macintoshages). This floating attention, navigating according to underground links and sometimes cabalistic logic, also haunts the works of Susan Hiller and Suzanne Treister, who evolve in the field of dreams. and hallucination.

Younger artists such as Laurence Cathala and Fouad Bouchoucha question the linguistic redesign of digital communication and its tools, which foster hypertextuality, polyphony and the infinite generation of comments, as well as the re-encoding of daily exchanges.

Daria Martin Soft Materials’ film offers a counterpoint to this order of speech, recording the silent choreography that is played between dancers and improvising machines in an artificial intelligence laboratory of duos guided by mimicry and automatic learning. Faced with machine sensors, perceptions of the human body replay a story of sensitivity taken in a turning point. The attention given to the body, to its care and survival, is at the heart of a new installation by Batia Suter, invited to produce a new work.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the curators have designed the 10th edition of Royal Garden, with the collaboration of artist Laurence Cathala and graphic designer Vincent Maillard for the development of the website. Named « _côté jardin_ » (garden side), this online editorial space exercises our Internet surfing habits to other gymnastics, offering netizens the opportunity to experiment with different reading modes inspired by the book wheels invented by the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli in the 16th century, and the possibilities offered by “mechanical reading” (a term developed by researcher Katherine Hayles to describe the comprehension of digitally mediatised text). Côté jardin website proposes to " pick the random " to constantly replay the combination of content derived from the exhibition, with the help of an indexing system. Texts, images, sounds and animations redesign the works of the exhibition in the mode of version, association, memory, interpretation or echo. It will be possible to consult côté jardin website as a “card reader”, and to print, from home or from Crédac, a single proof in an A4 format.