Digital technologies are shaping the way we act and interact with our daily environment. In this era of ubiquitous digital flows and artificial intelligence fed by big datas, men have entered a new space of sensitivity.
In the framework of a unique partnership between Eiwan Al Gassar and HORS-CADRE gallery, in collaboration with Mathqaf, NEO-TECHNO-NATURAL showcases the work of Mathieu Merlet Briand who reveals the influence of digital technologies on the perception of our contemporary reality.
The artist continuously explores our relationship to the Internet, a relationship he describes as “an illusory matter” for we mostly ignore materiality of this cloud, its functionality, as well as its real impact on the environment. By using big datas as a medium and through the algorithms he develops, this digital native shapes data flows in order to create tangible materialisations.
Abstractions, relics, crystallisations or fragments of the World Wide Web, his protean work gives body to digital ecosystems in the form of lenticular prints and sculptures, thus questioning the internet materiality while raising the issue of its environmental impact.
For this exhibition, Mathieu Merlet Briand presents a new project: New Nature. Inspired by our connected environment, this nervous system that, although artificial, now appears as “natural” and an integral part of our organic relationship to the world.
His sculptures #QUARTZ and #DNA, shaped as rocks, tells us about these future durable data storage and translates a form crystallisation of this digital memory. Mathieu Merlet Briand was also inspired by the natural environment of the Gulf with its infinite vision towards the sea or the desert, analogy to this ocean of information that the artists seeks to translate into his works.
Through four series - "Environment", "Dual World", "New Memory" and "#Nature" – he materialises this new hybrid nature in which we live and synthesises the challenges of the post-digital era.
NEO-TECHNO-NATURAL therefore proposes a reflection on the impact of technologies on artistic processes and researches. On a wider scale, it also showcases a new sensitivity toward the nature and environment with, as a background, the ecological stakes of our present times.
