Grégory Chatonsky Flußgeist
© G. Chatonsky, 2007
Opening on Saturday, February 21, 2009 at 5 pm
Commented visit with the artist on Saturday, February 28, 2009 at 2 pm
Flußgeist is a series of works inspired by the concept of Zeitgeist. Strangely, industries have quite intuitively appropriated this notion to refer to pages giving access to flux suspension, i.e., for Google, words with the most searches during a year. Flußgeist is based on the principle that what is called Web 2.0 is not simply a marketing discourse, but the first industry that feeds on the existence of each and every individual, through sites such as Flikr, Facebook and Youtube.
With Flußgeist the objective is not only to create a visualized data interface, but also to possibly construct non-narrative fictions based on all these fluxes. These are on-going videos that change according to incoming information. This temporality no longer has to do with duration (Andy Warhol’s Empire or Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho) or loops (Rodney Graham’s How I Became A Ramblin’ Man), involving instead another mode of appropriation on the part of the audience: skimming through the network as if it were a city, imagining the millions of voices of its inhabitants, its passers-by. Perceiving the density of anonymity.
Interview with the artist
Un Show de Mot'Arts
March 10, 2009 10:30-12 pm, CISM 89,3 FM
and 12 pm-1:30 pm, CHOQ.CA
Grégory Chatonsky : de la perte, du gain et de la persistance dans les mouvances du trans
by Chantal T.Paris, ETC Montréal, Fall 2009
Fluβgeist / Zeitgeist – Chatonsky à l’ère de la connexion aléatoire
by Denyse Therrien, October 2009
Further readings:
© G. Chatonsky, 2007
Born in Paris and currently living in Montreal and Paris, Grégory Chatonsky holds a philosophy master’s from the Sorbonne and a multimedia advanced degree from the Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts in Paris. In 1994, Chatonsky founded a net.art collective, incident.net, and has produced numerous works, such as the websites of the Pompidou Centre and Villa Médicis, the graphic signature for the Musée contemporain du Val-de-Marne, and interactive fiction for Arte.