The Directives
The Directives is a serie in progress that is now composed of 3 woodcuts :
- DMZ, Seoul, 1953
- The Attila line, Nicosia, 1974
- The Green line, Tel-Aviv, 2002
The study of ancient and actual military devices of premonition has a large part in my work. It seems to me that it is particularly important nowadays to trace and to exploit a potential history of the divination within the armed corps.
Today, security devices, from the local scale, where they aim to predict the areas that are likely to be burglarized, to the global scale, where they aim to predict military movements, are organized in a way that makes the subject of anticipation omnipresent.
Even though this tendency appears to be currently purely technological, the security devices operating thanks to algorithms and data processing, it has to be reconnected to a history that is a lot broader and more complex, recovering every civilizations from the Antiquity.
Computing programs have presently become this miraculous figure to which we entrust the analysis of our daily concerns because they are the heir of the seer's human figure.
The Greek Pythia, the Roman sybils or the Chinese Empire's astronomer, each of these incarnation was tightly tied to the political realm, and supposed to intervene when some crucial decisions were taken.
For this artwork, I used the codex "Classified Divinations on Military Affairs", a Chinese woodprint from 1597 which portrays an astronomical map. The emperor's astronomer was supposed to interpret the sky's omens in order to decipher future battles and thus to build fortifications. For this work, I overthrow the protocol through an astronomical software that calculates and shows the position of the stars and planets visible from a designated point on Earth on a designated date. I chose to depict the sky above cities where a defensive device was built, the night before the decision was taken. These constructions that I singled out are still striving today.
In these carvings appears a delayed composition, which doesn't call for deciphering and whose decryption's method has disappeared.
Only these astronomical coordinates remain, handcrafted which allows us to link a historical connection between the contemporary fortifications and the legacy that establishes them. The image here cannot be exploited anymore and stays in the state of a purely potential code. It leaves the spectator powerless and nonetheless longing to find an answer.
- DMZ, Seoul, 1953
- The Attila line, Nicosia, 1974
- The Green line, Tel-Aviv, 2002
The study of ancient and actual military devices of premonition has a large part in my work. It seems to me that it is particularly important nowadays to trace and to exploit a potential history of the divination within the armed corps.
Today, security devices, from the local scale, where they aim to predict the areas that are likely to be burglarized, to the global scale, where they aim to predict military movements, are organized in a way that makes the subject of anticipation omnipresent.
Even though this tendency appears to be currently purely technological, the security devices operating thanks to algorithms and data processing, it has to be reconnected to a history that is a lot broader and more complex, recovering every civilizations from the Antiquity.
Computing programs have presently become this miraculous figure to which we entrust the analysis of our daily concerns because they are the heir of the seer's human figure.
The Greek Pythia, the Roman sybils or the Chinese Empire's astronomer, each of these incarnation was tightly tied to the political realm, and supposed to intervene when some crucial decisions were taken.
For this artwork, I used the codex "Classified Divinations on Military Affairs", a Chinese woodprint from 1597 which portrays an astronomical map. The emperor's astronomer was supposed to interpret the sky's omens in order to decipher future battles and thus to build fortifications. For this work, I overthrow the protocol through an astronomical software that calculates and shows the position of the stars and planets visible from a designated point on Earth on a designated date. I chose to depict the sky above cities where a defensive device was built, the night before the decision was taken. These constructions that I singled out are still striving today.
In these carvings appears a delayed composition, which doesn't call for deciphering and whose decryption's method has disappeared.
Only these astronomical coordinates remain, handcrafted which allows us to link a historical connection between the contemporary fortifications and the legacy that establishes them. The image here cannot be exploited anymore and stays in the state of a purely potential code. It leaves the spectator powerless and nonetheless longing to find an answer.
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