We are glad to announce that two projects from the art-residency (‘Artists for Media’) track will be exhibited at Experimenta 2022! The work presented will be Gaëtan Robillard’s Critical Climate Machine and part of the collective Domestic Data Streamers’ installation named 730 hours of violence. Both projects were developed during MediaFutures first support programme.
The exhibition will take place in Grenoble, a city located in the French Alps, from October 19 to 22. The biennial starts the week before, on the 12th, with theatre plays and spectacles.
What is Experimenta?
If the name Experimenta was coined in 2018, its heritage goes back to 2002, when a local theatre, the ‘Hexagone’ organised a first event bringing artists, scientists and business companies altogether. The objective was to foster innovation by sharing different imaginaries. Since this first edition in 2002, the research centre in atomic studies (CEA) has been involved in experiments at the nexus of sciences and art during these events.
In 2007, the theatre and the atomic research centre then decided to associate and created the ‘Atelier Arts-Sciences’, an organisation entirely dedicated to give a place to and support experiments from artists and scientists working in collaboration. Experimenta 2022 will be the 11th edition of this biennial, that is a landmark in the French and European art-science landscape.
Gäetan Robillard, Critical Climate Machine
Critical Climate Machine is a project that quantifies and reveals the mechanisms of misinformation on global warming. The project environment consists of a walk-in room with a data sculpture and a sound installation.
Using AI, the sculpture analyses myths about climate change. Its software monitors and debunks false arguments coming from social media. When the sculpture is very active, it overheats, warming up the space around it. Hence the rise in temperature becomes a measure of the amount of online disinformation at any given time. Meanwhile, a soundscape surrounds the sculpture: false arguments are voiced by a dialoguing speech entity, to whom a second one answers and refutes these claims.
The artistic project is largely inspired by research in the field of cognitive sciences. These have shown – much like inoculation in biology, that disinformation can be neutralised by exposing the public to a weak form of disinformation.
Since the graduation of this project in September 2021, it has been exhibited at the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany) from December 2021 to May 2022. The artist also held several talks on this project, at Sónar Lisboa and at Central Saint Martins. In addition, the code written when working for this artwork is now publicly accessible and hosted by the ZKM, meaning that the code is hosted by a museum. Finally, learnings from MediaFutures are also used in his teaching activities to design students.
For Experimenta, along the installation Critical Climate Machine, some workshops using the edutainment card game developed by the artist will be organised.
Domestic Data Streamers, 730h of violence
We live in an age of information overload. It is everywhere and typically represented through data visualisation systems that aren’t clear enough for us to understand or emotional enough for us to empathise with. Eventually, this generalised misinformation has translated to a global lack of action.
The 730 hours of violence exhibition is an open lab of museographic experimentation and at the same time a thermometer to measure the opinion and perception of the public. It has been conceived as a month-long exercise in citizen interaction that expands the discourse of the physical space through the possibilities offered by digital platforms. The artistic collective Domestic Data Streamers wants to open a global discussion to examine where exactly our definition of violence is rooted, and thus, open questions about the information sources that condemn or legitimate our daily lives.
Note: The artwork addresses difficult subjects and includes language that people may find offensive.
After a first one-month-long iteration in September 2021 at the Mutuo Gallery in Barcelona, two modules of the 730 hours of violence installation will be displayed in Grenoble, and the collective is invited to a panel discussion on the phenomena of violence online.
For anyone interested in artscience and a trip to the French Alps, Experimenta 2022 is the place to be!