Emile Barret
"Born in the same year with the World Wide Web, I’m sort of a mad scientist who dreams to travel through time and space. I’ve always needed a strong theoretical framework for my work, so I often tried to conduct my own anthropological research. When I first started designing video games, everything exploded: that was so much more transdisciplinary than everything I known! It was much closer to amusement parks, funfairs, and a kind of interactive art, environments that have always touched me deeply because of the means they employ to achieve immersion. When I realized that my weaknesses could also be assets, my world changed. Using the Atlas as a medium – drawing inspiration from Aby Warburg to Georges Didi-Huberman – and curiosity as a leitmotiv, I learned how to combine knowledge to confront opposing contents and forms as an attempt to understand the world; at the same time, I was still confronted with many inherent impossibilities of the condition of life.
The piece represents a singular point of view on things – among many others – and all its attributes are multi-sensitive and non-fixed, both in form and content. They are all connectable for many reasons, and together form groups that may (or may not) also complement each other. The goal is to build cross-bridges between things conceptually, spatially, temporally, by working with layers, scratching wounds, stacking, covering, pass through, scrambling the viewer’s gaze, putting sand on the slopes, including references, working in situ, continuing in all directions to mix brains! The encyclopedic status offers positions to interpret the world, where suffocation, intelligibility, concentration, and interaction are some important ways to communicate. In their turn, these ways produce a very tense rhythm, which is also much closer to our daily life experiences than the “white cube” dictatorship. Growing (up) with internet made possible this immediate knowledge comprehension, which is for me a kind of Art."