So Far, So Good. Digital, Electronic and Media Arts Event – 12/9 to 12/17, Le Vigan – France

So Far So Good.

Digital, Electronic and Media Arts Event

From the 9th to the 17th december 2011

Le Vigan (30120)

FRANCE

Jusqu'ici, tout va bien

  • Exhibition : Keyvane Alinaghi, Art-Act, Erró, Alain Declerq et Jeanne Susplugas, Antonin Fourneau, Fiorenza Menini, Mollindustria

Château d'Assas, 11 rue des Barris

Pop, intriguing and political, this exhibition includes diversified artworks as videos, interactive dispositives and video-games. The spectator will face surprising point of views, question our relation to the society and what structures it within the current issues. 

  • Performance : PHASE 3 "Sinon"

Saturday 10th december 7 pm

Chapelle de la Condamine

Interdisciplinary and collective project, Phase 3 uses as raw material the city, its pace, its spaces. The project is invented in its heart and translate its beats and rythm, it is born from the shared space of the social act, leading to a thinking on interconnection  of human and urban networks. Designed as a multimedia environment, Phase 3 oversteps the boundaries and decompartmentalizes disciplines such as poetry, music, digital art, video, writing, performance.

  • Films

Cinema Le Palace, 7 pm

3, rue sous le Quai

"Un monde pour soi"  - Nathalie Combe and Yann Sinic

"The Cost of Life" - Beatriz da Costa

"The Ambassy" - Chris Marker

A selection of artists films related to the exhibition's issue "So Far, So Good"

Statement

From a society of fear maintained by the idea of terrorism, we turned to a collective mode of anxiety. Oussama Ben Laden's end marks a turn in the post 9/11 period in a mediatic acme which tries to live down the doldrums of a war that is symbolically and economically expensive.

Undergoing an everyday life insecured by successive crises, we live in suspense of new disasters : environment, health, politics, economics, etc. No possible escape, no way-out and a feeling of impotency lead ti foresee the future as an uncertained and alarming idea.

So Far So Good. The difficulties are known but the symptoms are not intense enough to disrupt daily life. Calm before the storm...

What to do till then ?

One possibility is to enjoy as long as possible the "modern" life – hence privileged – using all the means provided by society. One other possibility is considering the prospects and integrating them as factors in our life choices – a valid option fot those who can afford them. Then it is an anticipatory gamble : built a house in heights and not by the beach to avoid the rise in the water level, have nutritional supplements for a lifetime to prevent cancer, sink a well, not put all the money in bank, learn to start a fire, stock up of food, learn to recognize toxic and edible plants...

Anxiety is measures-consuming : from comfort to action. In this kind of period, stasis can lead to pressing urgency to react. Rational or irrational, strategies are set to face this anxiogenic society : neo-rural, dissenting movements, medical alternatives, self-determination, etc.

So Far So Good is kind of a mantra for the present moment to last the longest, to slow it down. To be reassured as sort to remain self-controlled still being conscious of the inevitable collapse we're rushing to. It is also not without irony to recall Mathieu Kassovitz's "La Haine" (the Hatred), which highlights the outskirts ostracism and the discredit of young people, and in which the off screen voice ends the film with those words : "So far so good. But what matters is not the fall. It is the landing."

Paradigm of our society, the film showed a latent violence which could explode without being based on ideological or political ground, unlike the radical movement of the 70-80's1. Since 1995, numerous riots started in the "banlieues", and spread in the country foiling the authorities to control them. The classes division is growing and the global crise just cristallizes, exemplifizes and shows an uneasiness which became too present to be simply ignored. Yet time is more and more winged, the disasters follow on, with even more impact due to the technological and media flows, giving no rest to have hindsight and face a growing anxiety. Disaster scenarios, dark myth, dystopia and eschatologies resurface to thrive on global fantasy, tainted with complacency or even masochism. It is ineluctable, we're heading for disaster. Let's imagine the worst...

1. Red Brigades in Italiy, Action Directe in France, Red Army Faction in Germany

Doctrines get tougher. It is easy to embrace them since they're like counter-measures of a deleterious clime. Under the system of consensus, it is easiest to contribute to a global regime and accept a plain classification : gender, social, racial or religious origines. One doesn't identify anymore by a territory or a language, this model is obsolete. This is a time for tribes ; aggregating uses, knowledges, specific ways of being by which one is determined almost permanently. We daily experience it, the barb still gets deeper. Malleability is a quality in demand, unlike adaptability. We are identified by what molded us in the past, by our experiences. Anything else, the improbable, the hypothesis are rejected because they complicate our intergation. Infringement cannot be considered. Computer specialist and mason ? Choose one of them. Rural and urban, not possible ! Humanist and individualist, aberration. Then, they are numerous to gladly adopt a uniform and integrable model. Self-representativeness steps in theses games of identification in a very simplistic way. All-or-none. It is an implacable inclusion, a contratrio to exclusion, which is supposedly is defined as progress.

Yet, this conception is likely too binary and false. We prefer to refer to the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss :

" by pulling aside space and time the model from which we're inspired, we certainly take a risk, which is to understimate the reality of progress. Our stance is as to say that men have always and everywhere the same task, setting themselves the same object, and that underway their future only the means differed […] The zeleous of progress imperil themselves to misread, by their little interest, the huge richness accumulated by humanity on both sides of the tight line which they keep watching ; by understimating the importance of past efforts, they disparage all what remain to be accomplished […] Nothing is over yet ; we can start everything again. What was done and failed can be redone. The golden age that a blind superstition placed behind [or in front of] us, is within us.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Tristes Tropiques”, p.470-471. ed.Pocket 2009

So Far So Good will therefore question the society of anxiety and the responses that artists attempt to surface within an environment becoming threatening. The specificity of artists being creation, it will be less about stasis that about stances, thinking and proposals to respond to our anxiety present and future.

Oudeis is supported by the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles du Languedoc-Roussillon, Languedoc-Roussillon County, Gard General Council and the city of Le Vigan.

With the participation of the DICRéAM Ministry of Culture and Communication, CNC, CNL.

For this evant, Oudeis gets supports as well from the pôle Culturel du Château d’Assas, the Communauté des Communes du Pays Viganais, the cinema le Palace at  Vigan, the FRACLR and the regional Museum of contemporary Art in Languedoc-Roussillon Sérignan for the artworks they lend us, but also the magazines Neural, MCD, Chicxulub, Radio-Escapades, Divergence FM, Kawenga territoires numériques and the Dindon Electrique.

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