2023-11-09 11:15:08
“Landscape Deer” (2023), by Robbie Barrat. ROBBIE BARRAT
At the Paris Photo fair, the major global event for still images which is being held at the ephemeral Grand Palais until Sunday November 12, on the stand of the Jean-Kenta Gauthier gallery, surprise. There are no images, just words, in English. They were written on the walls by the American artist David Horvitz, like haikus. “Pebbles thrown into the sunset”, “The shadow of Ela, a few days old. » Or just: ” Money. » These are descriptions of personal and banal digital images that the artist took from his archives and which he decided to erase permanently. A poetic way of evoking the surge of images that characterizes our time, our mania for living each moment through photography.
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This “low-tech” work is paradoxically presented in the new “digital sector” of the fair, which, for the first time, brings together artists working on digital technology. “Visitors will probably find that it doesn’t look very digital! », recognizes the Swiss Nina Roehrs, the curator who brings together the work of around thirty artists on nine stands. “This section concerns artists who use digital as a tool, but also all those who are interested in the way it disrupts all our societies. The result can therefore take any digital or physical form, summarizes Nina Roehrs. Artists here range from pioneers of computer art in the 1950s and 1960s to those working on artificial intelligence [IA]. » Paris Photo is currently one of the only fairs to have a section dedicated to digital art, which does not surprise Nina Roehrs: “Photographers have been confronted with the arrival of digital for a long time. »
In fact, there are a few screens on site, but above all a lot of photo prints, drawings, images on different media, sculptures, objects… and even an arcade game. The one reinvented by the young Robbie Barrat, at the Avant Galerie. At only 22 years old, this American is, in reality, a historic artist of artificial intelligence and crypto art, a genre linked to blockchain technology (the blockchain allowing the storage and transmission of information without a controlling body ) .
“The Big Buck Hunter” (2023), by Robbie Barrat. ROBBIE BARRAT
For his project The Big Buck Hunterhe hacked a famous hunting game where you had to shoot deer with a rifle. “It’s a game I played growing up in West Virginia, he said, but I was struck by its violence. We only see the landscapes for a few seconds, and the deer are perpetually on the run. » In its version, this game of death has become an ecological contemplation, where deer graze peacefully in untouched nature. The work is only available in the form of the physical game, to plug in at home − Robbie Barrat could have edited scenes from the game in the form of digital images, but he definitively gave up on NFTs, non-fungible tokens, in disgust by speculation around his works.
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