Pascal Dombis
Irrational Environments
Rational
judgements repeat rational judgements.
Irrational
judgements lead to new experience.
Sol LeWitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969)
Today's world strikes
me as a place where orderly control and chaotic aleatory forces coexist.
As an artist, I exploit this paradoxical coexistence to shape destructuring
structures and develop irrational environments.
The irrational comes
from the excessive repetition of simple processes. Such an activity
is very similar to that of human thought. A human brain is actually
made of neurons and neurons, in turn, are made of microtubulae. These
tubulae work as automated cellular agents with an algorithmic mode of
functioning. Derived from medieval arithmetics, an algorithm has been
understood since the nineteenth century to be "a series of explicit
operating rules", in other words, it is a set of instructions designed
to achieve something, for instance "Drawing a segment of a straight
line 10 times and changing its orientation and dimension after each
inscription". A computer is the ideal tool to execute an algorithm ;
as a matter of fact, it is the only thing it can do. By executing the
operation "drawing a segment of a straight line 10 times and changing
its orientation and dimension after each inscription", one comes to
a structure visibly made of 10 straight lines. Yet, when repeated one
million times, the same operation does not produce one million straight
lines but an altogether different environment in which the mere notion
of 'straight line' disappears to let other signs emerge. The resulting
space is unpredictable, unstable and dynamic. Visual forms appear -
they are not intentionally programmed - out of the excessive enforcement
of autonomous and simple rules. I do not consciously conceive a structure
in advance. I lay down simple rules and let them go through serial interaction.
Where I find myself then - the environment in which I am - becomes my
working space (where I do what W.S. Burroughs calls "the job of the
cosmonaut of inner space").
Nevertheless, when
accumulated or brought together in networks, the microtubulae of the
brain's neurons are responsible for all the non-algotithmic possibilities
of the human brain. The simplicity of the basic data is important. That
is why I use arbitrary geometrical or typographical signs - rather than
representational elements or pictorial fragments - so as to reach more
complex, richer, and less reasonable environments. With digital
tools, it is often more tempting to go for what is sophisticated rather
than for what is simple. My own way of working with computers is simplistic
; I try to make the most of it as a computational tool for its capacity
to ceaselessly repeat the same task. No more, no less. It gives access
to different sensational environments (vertigo, serenity, vortex, spell,
curse, alacrity, infinitude, deją vu experiences of non structuring
structures) which are not solely caused by optical or geometrical illusions
or - paradoxically - by purely technological artefacts. This is why
my artistic practice is a neverending experimentation with what is still
un-known or un-thought.
The line-ridden
irrational environments with which chance surrounds me - and later authoritatively
shaped by me - are not completely unlike from the Songlines of Australian
Aborigenes. They too convey a vision of the world in terms of itinaries
and displacement, offering another kind of mapping in which networks
get into the picture. It is my job to confront the human viewer with
their own primitive irrationality through my artworks, artworks that
result from an abuse of technological processes.
Translation Didier
Girard
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