Without hardware materialization, digital is precisely that: immersion in an ecosystem that envelops and conditions us, but which we perceive no more than the air we breathe. But this generational precision also reflects and betrays a question of threshold.
If he has inherited the Post-Internet and Post-Digital movements from his predecessors, it's equally true to say that Mathieu Merlet Briand is their successor - albeit by a small margin, bearing witness to the fact that the acceleration of time is a very real thing.
If he has inherited the Post-Internet and Post-Digital movements from his predecessors, it's equally true to say that Mathieu Merlet Briand is their successor - albeit by a small margin, bearing witness to the fact that the acceleration of time is a very real thing.
Rather than an unbridled celebration of radiant horizons (and WiFi), rather than a Luddite critique of technology, the artist positions himself on the side of realism.
Exhibitions such as #iceberg (2017) and Environnement (2017) are born of this attachment to reality. Using sculptures to model the results of data cultivation, these installations bring the planet's deterioration under the impact of so-called dematerialized technologies physically close to us. Over the past few years, the artist's latest works have focused precisely on demonstrating the extent to which imagining the Cloud and representing it as a gaseous nebula is a matter of belief. One of the artist's most recent works, #Red-Screen Temple, focuses on the remanence of archaic technological systems and their return to the very heart of modern rationality, which thought it had triumphed. That the media of each age generate their own spectres and mythologies was echoed by Jacques Ellul as long ago as 1952 in La technique ou l'enjeu du siècle. It's as if we can hear him, or some distant ghost, coming back to haunt Mathieu Merlet Briand's plays, declaiming: “In the world we live in, it is technology that has become the essential mystery. (...). We believe in it because its miracles are visible and progressing”.
Ingrid Luquet-Gad
