Projet EVA (CA): "The Object of the Internet", 2017

aluminum structure, acrylic panels, computer, motors, microcontrollers and electronic components, LEDs, sound system, vinyl printed on polycarbonate, bench

The disorganization of the world by financial capitalism, uprooted and volatile, in part fostered the emergence of the Internet. This network has gradually become the matrix through which our communities and individualities have restructured their exchanges. The promise of a greater flow of ideas, increased freedom, and even new forms of citizenship, now comes up against the power of capital and the dislocated and entropic nature of such a technological arrangement. "The Object of the Internet" is a kinetic installation by Projet EVA (Etienne Grenier and Simon Laroche), evoking the idea of a mausoleum conjuring the end of the Web. Through optical and kinetic processes integrated into a device in which the visitor inserts his head, the human face is broken down into a multitude of fragments. Visitors are projected into a dystopian future where, on social media, only the traces of our selfies, which are artificially animated, remain in the form of a reflection. The latter, condemned to the status of a sterile solipsism, agitates in a sidereal void of the end of the Internet.

The epitaph of the monument-mausoleum: “I have seen many people spill their guts on–line, and I did so myself until, at last, I began to see that I had commodified myself.”
–Carmen Hermosillo, poet, blogger and pioneer of the social Internet, 1994

The creation of "The Object of the Internet" was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Étienne Grenier and Simon Laroche [Projet EVA] (CA)

Projet EVA’s (Etienne Grenier and Simon Laroche) artworks explore relations established between humans, their environment and its mediation through technological systems. The collective focuses mainly on the subtractive effects of technology and media on human experience, as well as on how the virtual world is increasingly woven into the urban and social landscape as it encroaches on physical reality. Underneath the collective’s custom-made applications, robots and assorted machines lies an inquiry into how technology impacts the construction of our social and psychological realities as well as our living environment.

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