EventsUncoupdedés.net — Le Parc Saint-Léger
Event
Uncoupdedés.net
Le Parc Saint-Léger
Past: February 10, 2013 → February 14, 2014
Hiatus
Parc Saint Léger is located in a rural area and sees itself as a laboratory, fully committed to its artists and concerned with establishing effective dialogue within the territory. Multi-role artist Aurélien Mole has collaborated with the centre d’art for several years now and was invited in two capacities: he has worked as an In Situ exhibition photographer since 2007 and contributed to the Minusubliminus Hors les Murs project in 2011. Also a critic and art historian, here, Aurélien Mole ponders the role of rural centres d’art in a unique and prospective way, seeing them as producers of knowledge on the fringes of society.
My name is Aurélien Mole; I am an art historian. I am currently finishing my doctorate, which I must present to the jury in September 2075. I am engaged in the international campaign for the retrieval of digital archives following the Great Crash of 2055. What differentiates me from my peers, who were involved in the same operation half a century earlier, stems from this act of cyber terrorism that caused a hiatus in human progress.
Just like Gutenberg’s invention in its time, the profound change in humanity’s relationship to information was nonetheless a fluid transition. The power of computers had consistently increased, while their components became increasingly minute. In the early 1980s, this growth, combined with telecommunication networks, had allowed remote workstations at distances of several hundreds of kilometres to become interconnected. Consequently, the pass-band had increased in conjunction with the power of microprocessors and the office computer had become a family tool, with individuals thus becoming their own typists. While the slow speed of the early Internet connections now makes us smile, the amount of information that could be exchanged increased to light speed with the advent of fibre optics. In less than twenty years, communication habits completely changed, allowing each individual to become a potential transmitter of information. Hence the quantity of data produced exploded. Data centres, discreet buildings containing hundreds of thousands of interconnected servers were multiplied, without ever coming close to saturation point. Virtual storage, then known as “clouds”, allowed individuals to own an online space in which to accumulate their data. Naturally, the media of the 20th century suffered from this IT infatuation and in 2030, Le Monde published its last paper edition. Soon after, Google and its robots decided to undertake a colossal digitisation campaign. Whosoever wanted to get rid of their home library could call on their services. Movers came to your house and packed up your books, they loaded the cartons into a white truck and, within a few weeks, you received an address via Internet, where you could access your digitised and classified library: all this was free of charge. Advertisements showed fleets of immaculate vehicles unloading the cartons onto conveyor belts in huge warehouses on the outskirts of cities. Each book was scanned by a Google robot capable of accessing its content without even opening it. What became of the books after that was not shown.
