2021 - 2025
Félix Luque, Vincent Evrard & Damien Gernay
Automation technologies replace us as masters of repetition, collaborative work, data and calculation. But they also replace Sisyphus, condemned like him to repeat and undo a task in perpetuity.
Perpétuité I
Mechatronic installation
2021
Perpétuité II
Robotic installation
2023
We are facing our own extinction as our technological creations and machines overtake us as masters of repetition, collaborative work, data and calculation. But they also replicate Sisyphus, condemned to repeat and undo a task in perpetuity.
Industrial robots are designed to carry out repetitive tasks with almost absolute precision. They perform them without fatigue; rest, or any loss of concentration and hesitation. It is the mastery of automation- a synchronous symphony.
Wrapped up in the marketing of progress, these new technologies are supposed to set us free. But technology under the control of neoliberalism, guided by the sole aim of profit, keeps alienating humans from production in a radical way.
In the installation series “Perpétuité,” we projected a dystopian vision of the future in which humans would have disappeared, following the fulfilment of the technoneoliberal dream (the total replacement of humans by automation systems) and robots would be left to themselves in endless tasks.
In his book “Pourquoi tout n'a-t-il pas déjà disparu?” Jean Baudrillard wrote- "Haven't we always had a deep fantasy of a world that would function without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, exempt from any human will- all too human?”
In today's world, which is becoming hyper-connected, hyper-automated and hyper-controlled by algorithms, we imagine, like Baudrillard, a vision in which humans have disappeared and technical objects, left to their own devices, continue to exist without them.
The exhibition is conceived as a space of contemplation. This means to rethink our relationship to technology, and its implications in the mode of production, consumption and desire that dominates our contemporary ultra-globalised existence.
Credits
Perpétuité by Felix Luque, Damien Gernay & Vincent Evrard
Perpétuité I is a coproduction of “secteur arts numériques, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles” and "Chroniques 2020 (Biennal of Digital Imagination)”.
Perpétuité II is a coproduction of “secteur arts numériques, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles”, "Chroniques 2022 (Biennal of Digital Imagination)” and iMAL.