![\"CO-WORKERS_MAMVP_8219\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/CO-WORKERS_MAMVP_82191.jpg\")
Co-Workers, installation view. Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Photo: \u00a9 Pierre Antoine<\/p>\n Co-Workers, installation view. Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Photo: \u00a9 Pierre Antoine<\/p>\n
Sliding doors dominate the entrance to the exhibition \u201cCO-WORKERS \u2013 Le r\u00e9seau comme artiste\u201d<\/em> in Paris. Each time the doors open and close they produce a muffled nad peculiar sound that sets the eerie mise-en-scene created by New York collective DIS. Curated by Angeline Scherf, Toke Lykkeberg and Jessica Castex, the show brings together more than 30 artists including Hito Steyerl, Future Brown and Jon Rafman who investigate the concept of production by developing ideas of co-working. C\u00e9cile B. Evans\u2019 flat screens sit next to Aude Pariset\u2019s and Juliette Bonneviot\u2019s fish tank, and other disparate practices and objects are shown together in a network of their own, blurring the divides between art and non-art. We met the co-curator Toke Lykkeberg to talk about the end of binaries as opposites, reinventing the individual and how artists have become prosumers.<\/p>\n Lets start to with the sliding doors. It\u2019s a pretty uncommon opening for an art exhibition. The display of \u201cCO-WORKERS\u201d makes me think of Dan Graham’s work. Is it a kind of Dan Graham 2.0? So the exhibition is about the contemporary world? What kind of world would you say we live in right now? If I look at this display made of glass and steel, forming a space within the larger space of the exhibition hall, it is hard to tell the works from each other. Do you think this is an aspect of our contemporary world \u2013 gaining something by losing parts of our individuality? Following your definition of network, one could think of an organism. For a few years, there\u2019s been a discussion concerning the question whether we should slow down our lives or adjust to the speed of information technology developing faster and faster. Is the exhibition a comment on or even a contribution to that discussion? So taking up your metaphor of the artist as a car driver, you understand an artist today as what you call a prosumer: a producer and consumer at the same time. Text by Marie-France Rafael<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cCO-WORKERS \u2013 Le r\u00e9seau comme artiste\u201d is on show at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art modern de la Ville de Paris<\/a> and runs until 31 January 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n More: Wild Parade: Mons Retraces the History of European Counterculture<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n
<\/strong>Toke Lykkeberg: The show starts with doors sliding open. There are a couple of other sliding doors in the show. This is part of the scenography that DIS has been in charge of. The many transparent and reflective surfaces lend the show a certain lightness so visitors sort of float through the space. It\u2019s like a space of flows of images, of data in a networked world. But it also reflects life in airports, malls, Apple stores and Starbucks. I know this mise-en-scene might recall ethnologist Marc Aug\u00e9\u2019s non-places. In the 1990s, in the wake of the introduction of TGV [French high-speed trains], he was interested in a new kind of solitary passenger who left places behind at high speed. But DIS has been more interested in the connected and social individuals, who linger, meet up, chill or work in environments with good Wi-Fi and a ubiquitous rather than transitory quality. Places are not negated, but rather mixed. So it\u2019s a world in which many divides seem to disappear like the barriers between work and leisure, private and public, commercial and non-commercial space and what is inside and outside, for instance of a museum. The show discusses the divides between what we once called \u201cthe virtual\u201d and \u201cthe real\u201d, between nature and society, the biosphere and the technosphere, east and west, and many other such binaries that no longer work as opposites.<\/p>\n![\"2.](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/2.-CW.jpg\")
DIS, The New Wholesome (tags: flip flops, dishwasher, gap, sniff), 2013. Courtesy DISimages<\/p>\n![\"3.](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/3.-CW.jpg\")
DIS, The New Art Handlers (Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with Lobster, 1643), 2013, Curated by Bjarne Melgaard with David Rimanelli. Courtesy DIS Magazine<\/p>\n
<\/strong>If 2.0, then I would say: yes. Dan Graham\u2019s work is a reflection on and of the modern world and its modernist architecture, but Co-Workers is not discussing the concept of the modern world in general.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Of course we wanted to create a show that reflects what is around us. While working on the show we realised that our surroundings were changing while we \u2013 and many others \u2013 were studying them. The problem with art called contemporary is that it is more fleeting than ever. When things accelerate around you, it is very difficult to be contemporary or \u201cwith time.\u201d We\u2019re rather out of time.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>We wanted to give each individual artist, group or collective his, her or their own space, but we did not want to cut it off from the rest of the show. Today an artist stands out as an individual, but at the same time as part of a network. They are \u201cnetworked individuals.\u201d Sometimes you cannot tell one work from the other. The works are shaped by overlapping yet personalised networks. It is almost impossible to separate the part from the whole, the individual from society, they constitute each other. Bruno Latour explains this idea in the following way: If you want to check out a person, you Google his name, for example \u201cBruno Latour\u201d. The more links you find about \u201cLatour\u201d spread out across the internet, the more he comes together as a person. You might feel you lose yourself in the network, but it might also be where you resurface.<\/p>\n![\"4.](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/4.-CW.jpg\")
DIS, Competing Images, 2012, Art pictured: Selection display: Ancestral prayer, 2012 by Timur Si-Qin. Courtesy DIS Magazine<\/p>\n![\"14.](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/14.-CW.jpg\")
Hito Steyerl, Liquidity Inc., 2014 (still), HD video file, single channel in architectural environment, 30 minutes, Edition of 7, with 2 APs, Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York<\/p>\n![\"15.](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/15.-CW.jpg\")
Ryan Trecartin, I-Be Area, 2007, Video Duration 1 hour, 48 minutes ARG# TRN2007-002. \u00a9 Ryan Trecartin, Image courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Douglas Coupland says somewhere in his recent writings: \u201cAt the moment we don\u2019t know which will triumph: the individual or the mob. It might be the biggest question of this century.\u201d My answer to the question would be: both. The individual might only reinvent itself, if it gives in to or adapts to its surroundings. You can only shape an environment that you are a part of. By resisting today\u2019s world or simply keeping it at a distance, you don\u2019t change its course. To a certain extent, you might rather have to lose a bit of control in order to regain influence. At least, many artists in the show work along these lines. An oft-heard critique of contemporary network theory is that the individual, the human subject is without power. By reflecting on these networks we might however empower that disempowered individual to impose itself in the networks.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>If you want things to circulate in a network you need mediation from one node to another. This mediation might be undertaken by an intermediary or a mediator. In the case of the intermediary, there is no transformation of content from one point to another. However, when an image travels from an exhibition space to a camera, to a computer, to Photoshop, to Facebook, to Instagram and ends up as a bad quality print, there\u2019s transformation. There are mediators translating the image so information is both lost and added. Artists work with
\nsuch mediators in the same way they now work with bacteria, animals, plants and so on. So I\u2019m also interested in networks at the intersection of bio- and techno-sphere.<\/p>\n![\"1.](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/1.-CW.jpg\")
DIS, The Island (KEN), 2015, Created in collaboration with Dornbracht and co-designed by Mike Meir\u00e9, Photography Heji Shin. Courtesy the artists<\/p>\n![\"CO-WORKERS_MAMVP_8396\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/CO-WORKERS_MAMVP_8396.jpg\")
Ryan Trecartin,\u00a0I-Be Area, 2007.\u00a0Co-Workers, Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Photo: \u00a9 Pierre Antoine.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Around 10 or 15 years ago the French artist Pierre Joseph said: \u201cIn order to understand how a car works, you have to take it apart.\u201d But artists today rather get inside the car and drive it. If we understand the world as networked then there is no outside anymore. Artists are less interested in utopias and more in the potential of the world we inhabit. We should accelerate some things, others we might slow down. But I don\u2019t believe in history given in advance, ie, that there is a certain goal to reach at the end of the journey. Therefore, I am not sure what it might mean to speed up the process we are in the midst of.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Yes, that\u2019s another dichotomy that I would like to mention as example of the end of the great divides, namely production and consumption. What characterises the artist today is that he is a prosumer, to a certain extent, part of a network where production and consumption are difficult to tell from each other. So today I see artists more as mediators or prosumers.<\/p>\n