Louis-Philippe Demers & Bill Vorn : Es-Das Wesen der Maschine

Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at the EMAF 2002 festival, Osnabrück, Germany, April 24 to May 20, 2002. With the monographic exhibition by the artistic duo Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn the European Media Art Festival is presenting the spectrum and variety of their current machine and robot art for the first time in Europe. The mechanical menagerie of the Canadians transforms motion, sound and colour reflexes into an experience ranging between art and spectacle. Fog, pulsating light, a specially developed sound-track and interactive devices dominate the exhi-bition rooms of the media artist LP Demers and the composer and sound designer B. Vorn: A ›swarm‹ of light cones confront visitors; oversized tables and chairs constantly buckle their legs; small machines operate in cages; misshapen spi-ders crawl across the floor; in an ›amphitheatre‹ robots follow visitors with light and camera, and a ›steel climbers‹ patiently attempt to scale the ceiling of the hall. In a word, the machines of the Canadian artists behave according to the basic rules of natural ecosystems such as action – reaction, pack movements and fighting over food: Demers and Vorn portray the relationship of man to machine with irony and fun in the bizarre behaviour of their metallic creations. Demers and Vorn have named two of their created environments ›La Cour des Miracles‹ (›The Court of Miracles‹) and ›Le Proces‹ (›The Process‹). Their allusions to the ›Courtyard of Miracles‹ in Victor Hugo’s ›The Hunchback of Notre Dame‹ and to the novel by Franz Kafka illustrate the inten-tion. Visitors are supposed to experience a combination of the hideousness and the romanticism as well as the confrontation with a mighty web of machinery. The artists consciously associate different technologies in their works, and thus present ›Janus head‹ of the mechanical or computer-based devices: On the one hand the automaton as a fascinating, future-oriented ›great white hope‹ with biological traits, and on the other hand its functional, chilling threat. This ambiguity enables the exhibition to become a highly topical contribution on the chances and risks of a mechanical world.