Flußgeist by Gregory Chatonsky :: until March 21, 2009 :: Artist Talk: February 28; 2:00 pm :: OBORO, 4001, rue Berri, local 301, Montreal, Canada.

Flußgeist is a series of works inspired by the concept of Zeitgeist. Strangely, industries have quite intuitively appropriated this notion to refer to pages giving access to flux suspension, i.e., for Google, words with the most searches during a year. Flußgeist is based on the principle that what is called Web 2.0 is not simply a marketing discourse, but the first industry that feeds on the existence of each and every individual, through sites such as flikr, facebook and youtube. With Flußgeist the objective is not only to create a visualized data interface, but also to possibly construct non-narrative fictions based on all these fluxes. These are on-going videos that change according to incoming information. This temporality no longer has to do with duration (Andy Warhol’s Empire or Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho) or loops (Rodney Graham’s How I Became A Ramblin’ Man), involving instead another mode of appropriation on the part of the audience: skimming through the network as if it were a city, imagining the millions of voices of its inhabitants, its passers-by. Perceiving the density of anonymity.

Born in Paris and currently living in Montreal and Paris, Grégory Chatonsky holds a philosophy master’s from the Sorbonne and a multimedia advanced degree from the Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts in Paris. In 1994, Chatonsky founded a net.art collective, incident.net, and has produced numerous works, such as the websites of the Pompidou Centre and Villa Médicis, the graphic signature for the Musée contemporain du Val-de-Marne, and interactive fiction for Arte. He has taught at the Fresnoy (national modern art studio, France) and at UQAM’s school of visual and media art. Chatonsky’s body of work, including interactive installations, networked and urban devices, photographs and sculptures, speaks to the relationship between technologies and affectivity, flow that define our time and attempts to create new forms of fiction. He has worked on numerous solo and group projects in France, Canada, the United States, Italy, Australia, Germany, Finland and Spain. His works have been acquired by public collectors such as the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. His work is represented by Numeriscausa Gallery in France, in the United States and in Germany by Poller Gallery.