Hyperphantasia, des origines de l’image by Justine Emard & Ma chair monde, prélude by Alexandre Fandard
Visit of the exhibitions every Wednesday at 6:45 pm (Registration required)
Exhibition from May 12 to July 12, 2023.

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Hyperphantasia
Des origines de l’image
Justine Emard, 2022

Installation : sculptures & film 12′

A production by Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains This work was produced as part of the off-site residency of the Observatoire de l’Espace, the cultural laboratory of the CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales).

From the depths of the cave to the depths of our brains, Hyperphantasia creates a space where 36,000 years of image technology meet; searching for the origin of images. In the Palaeolithic era, people plunged into the depths and darkness of caves, seeking to inscribe the work of the human mind on the rock walls. In 2022, computational sciences allow us to analyse large amounts of data and generate predictions. Using a scientifc database about the Chauvet Pont-d’Arc cave, an artifcial neural network was trained to produce new images of prehistory in order to create the work. A video wall slowly comes to life, giving a glimpse of a “new” prehistory, of the parallel imaginations of our ancestors. In 2021, a CNES and ESA mission began studying the evolution of sleep in space. Encephalographic data recorded over several nights made it possible for the artist to work with dream signals from space. Those signals from the depths of our unconscious are embodied in 3D printed dream architectures. A landscape stemming from the mental images appears in the light of the video.

From generating new images of prehistory using machine-learning model to the extrusion of dream sculptures from space; we follow the birth of new images from the depths of our imaginations that will merge and synchronise.

Technical installation: Voxels Production.

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Ma chair monde, prélude
Alexandre Fandard, 2023

"Matter as presence, the weight of the world. To undo the resemblance to produce presence, to collapse this resemblance to produce absence. Collapse the absence to create the relationship." Starting from a quest for his Afro-Caribbean origins and nourished by several philosophical or poetic concepts such as that of the "Flesh of the world" of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the "Whole world" of Edouard Glissant, Alexandre Fandard engages in an almost archaeological research. He perceives the world as a single living organism, as a common flesh, an old wall, a place of memory, an old skin that trembles, similar to our body, and seeks to explore and invoke this creolization of the world, in perpetual relation, where memories and cultures extend and quiver under the same skin. His research is based on this notion of universalism and on this back and forth between this memory of the world and that of our own body, which testifies to this uniqueness of things and to the way our world "breathes" and "breathes out" in its entirety. Ma chair monde , prélude is a first workshop outing around an ongoing series called Ma chair monde. They are a visceral desire, an urgent call to the world to "make a connection". "My body is a passage that matter borrows, a place crossed by all the elsewhere in the world, dilated in space and crossed by a language that is not reduced in space to a single path or determination."