POV: you’re upset because it’s the end of the world and you’re stuck between realities

About

As I was one of the first (and therefore one of the only ones for a while) among kids my age to have a phone and a computer, I couldn’t immediately use them to chat online with others. However, after moving, I could still keep in touch, while my parents continued to reconnect with their friends on Copains d’Avant. My phone and computer grew with me, accompanying me from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. They went through various updates, changing, and I sometimes struggled to recognize them, to be tolerant of their new ways of functioning and behaving with me. They sometimes cause me problems: it annoys me when there’s lag, it annoys me when there are bugs, and it also annoys me when they bombard me with notifications. I think we’ve developed a true codependent relationship. They are demanding, and there’s an obvious fear of abandonment. But I have friends like that too. People say that the Internet and social networks are rotten. At the same time, I learned to fix my water heater and resolve some relationship issues through Reddit and Wikihow, to make my own clothes through Instagram and YouTube, and to understand the rules of Belote Contrée on Wikipedia.

My phone stresses me out as much as it listens to me and comforts me. I try to make time for myself. I don’t know if the Internet, the Adobe and Microsoft suites, ChatGPT, TikTok, and the autocorrect help me save time. I wonder how people who have chosen different Google Chrome extensions than mine use the Internet. Do you use AdBlock? I don’t know in which filter bubble I find myself, but I know that my phone has figured out that I love dogs. Before, we only talked about cyberspace in science fiction, but it now occupies a whole part of our reality. Cyberspace is Twitter, Discord, Amazon, Twitch. One can think whatever they want about these technologies, digital, video games, and networks; they embody a multiple reality to which fiction belongs and with which they influence each

other, an extension of one another. Being human is having tools and instruments that enhance your reality. It’s about imagining and dreaming: a virtual substance that deals with the real because, in the end, ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ are hardly distinguishable from each other.

The magazine Errance, created by Jeanne Yuna Rocher, makes this connection through the treatment of shifting/daydreaming. Shifting/ daydreaming is the act of moving from a current reality to a desired reality, shifting one’s consciousness and mind from one reality
to another. Virtuality is not only conditioned by screens; it also manifests mentally. TikTok is the platform of choice for shifters who share their experiences of this solitary self-hypnosis technique. The waiting room where one can flip through the magazine is a liminal space that materializes this passage. However, shifting is an ambiguous psychological phenomenon that sometimes presents itself as

an unexpected detachment from the current reality. The waiting room then becomes a meeting place for individuals showing similar symptoms and awaiting a diagnosis.

The advent of the Internet thus comes with its share of alternative beliefs and mythologies. Montaine Jean’s installation Dreams&Hopes, evoking the form of an altar, reminds us that technology does not rid itself of spirituality. The Internet becomes a space where one can invoke wishes and prayers. Inspired by the imagination of adolescence, the installation presents a bedroom window open to a landscape calling for contemplation and reverie. By fantasizing about elsewhere, the mind gives birth to desires for autonomy and individuality expressed through consumer desires. The «gravoboi» (referring to the guru of a sect) are part of the «manifestations» that are these small magical formulas inscribed in the form of series of numbers. They express the hope of conforming to the norms (most often of beauty) conveyed in magazine advertisements (having larger breasts, losing weight, having thinner thighs, etc).

Facing this, The World Wide Surveillance Board series, The SpaceX cemetery by Lou Fauroux depicts a potential future in which there would be no space on earth for the dead, implying the creation of a celestial cemetery. Although rich in possibilities, digital tools
are embedded in a capitalist and exploitative context and are hungry for energy and mining resources. Is it still possible to envision emancipatory technology in a world tired by the depletion of its resources? The artist anticipates the end of the Internet and the obvious obsolescence of connected devices with The Internet Collapses series: VOL.1 The Porn Selector. The film follows the actress Kasey Warner and her attempt to preserve her porn business following the death of the Internet. Further into the exhibition, remains and relics where human organs mix with processors and lithium batteries testify to the fall of this civilization and the close link between humanity and technologies. Anticipating an archaeology of the future, Lou Fauroux scatters fragments of sometimes explicitly queer narratives for the next living entities to influence their future imaginaries.

– Camille Gouin

Jeanne Yuna Rocher (1999, Brest) graduated from the Beaux-Arts of Marseille. She lives and works in Marseille. At the intersection
of digital arts, film, sculpture, and publishing, the artist works on an immersive domestic and intimate space examining power and domination relationships. Adopting formats typical of pop culture and the audiovisual industry (reality TV, television interviews, metaverses, social networks), the artist focuses on the psychology of the individual alone and in groups and its materialization in virtual spaces and on the Internet. Social networks and other digital platforms become places of interaction between individuals, the formation of communities, social confrontation, where both voyeurism and isolation are exercised. They are simultaneously a territory of fantasies, of dreamed lives, and of mental confinement.

Montaine Jean (1995, Poitiers) graduated from the Beaux-Arts of Marseille. She lives and works in Marseille. Her work weaves connections between care and consumption. Interested in everything aimed at enhancing self-well-being, especially embodied in physical appearance, a reflection of mental state («you look good!»), Montaine Jean questions the cosmetic industry and its influence on the construction of being and the formation of identity. She uses internet culture as her prism to explore life after death and the creation of new consumption relationships experienced as desires for emancipation by individuals.

Lou Fauroux (1998, Mulhouse) studied at HEAD, Geneva and ECAL, Lausanne. She graduated from l’École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris. She lives and works in Paris. Her video and installation practice focuses on digital technologies, their interactions with humans, and the current and future uses of the Internet while speculating on its potential collapse. The narratives deployed in her films, influenced by her queer experience, attempt to update the images and representations she grew up with. The artist questions the new forms of work indexed on the development of new technologies and social networks. She dissects the social structures of power that rely, among other things, on the entertainment industry.