“A useless machine that does not represent anything is the perfect device through which we can easily revive our imagination, afflicted daily by useful machines.”
From Gutenberg to Big Data
While the passage of time seems to accelerate every day, Fred Penelle and Yannick Jacquet offer a pause, a suspension, a breath. A strange mechanism stretches across the wall, populated with shadowy chimeras. They are mysterious and yet somehow familiar. Is this a laboratory experiment or the plan for a future network? Minutely constructed like a fine clock, it traces connections, routes, genuinely-false, looping itineraries, inviting escape, inviting dreams. The narrative is deconstructed like a thousand-storied film script. Every effort is made to lead astray, to turn around, to forge ahead. Time is shredded, decomposed, lost and yet everything references it.Mécaniques Discursives is like a parenthesis between two epochs: Gutenberg's and Big Data's. By contrasting the oldest form of image reproduction (woodcutting) with the most recent digital technologies, the installation straddles centuries and contracts time.