OFLUXO

How to sit and snuggle up in the hollow of infinite and virtual worlds? Ittah Yoda’s installation for Double Sejour weaves a playful, and almost therapeutic bond as a collective and emancipatory alternative to the digital networks that surround and control.

 

Is sitting a rite as old as eating, playing cards, debating, working on your computer, drinking alcohol, playing an instrument, seeing a doctor, painting, contemplating an artwork, taking part in a meeting, embroidering, governing? Who can sit or lie down and when? Why were women so rarely represented seated, and men so rarely reclining?

 

A wooden sculpture-seat covered with soft bristles occupies the center of the space, for us to lie or sit on. This is a first point of contact with the living, with which the artistic duo collaborates harmoniously: we are sitting on a sensitive surface, an animal skin, which took shape on a software by an assembling and demultipliying organic forms. The object welcomes and guides us towards fresh worlds.

 

The space around is structured by metal plates used for lithography, suspended and sliced up to let fractioned images appear on their surface. One distinguishes the growing forms composing the bench, in very close-up. Projected paint on these surfaces suggests the superimposition of second images. They originate in the artists’; memories of threedimensional confocal scans of marine micro-organisms. Sculptures in glass paste emerge from the walls, the ceiling and the floor. A layer of concrete on the ground, like a projected shadow, supports the whole. The environment absorbed living and phantom forms while their goes on.

 

The physical experience is doubled by a mental one, which is activated once seated, or lying down, wearing a headset. Embedded in the landscapes, we melt into them. From the surface to the mind, the waking dream projects itself in all directions of the physical and mental environment of the place and time: “ Time’s all a shimmer, and to dream’s to know”.

 

Virtual reality, which acts when one is still, frees from physical constraints, from terrestrial gravity; archaic signals synchronize in our flying heads. The circuits of the virtual dream activate its immediate connections. An LED display offers a glimpse of what others are seeing inside the VR. One thinks of a language which could give way to other forms of communication, primary and active, such as those of the octopus or the cuttlefish which change shapes and colors to express themselves: “I always had this dream, when I was a child, that I could open my mouth and a projection would come out (…) Or maybe I would have an image on my skin like the  Cuttlefish ”(Philippe Parreno).

 

Virtual reality is a form of life with immediate connections with which to dialogue; which thinks itself autonomous, synaesthetic, underwater. Sitting positions, mental architectures: the ritual of a new system of beliefs and patterns that can be activated, all postures dreamed of. This metamorphic world is another system, just as alive as the one where the body forgets itself when it sleeps, but continues to live on its reclining, infinite journey.

 

“A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds” (Marcel Proust)