NATURE IN THE AGE OF ITS DIGITAL PRODUCTION
Grasses of equally improbable shades of green,
blue and red grow on the luminous screen and sway in the gentle breeze.
Their veins, visible against the light with each
movement of their leaves, form complex architectural structures. Beginning
as fragile sprouts, they gain strength and reach up toward an invisible
sky. As long as nothing interrupts their expansion, they multiply and
tend to saturate the entire space. They are driven by the will to power
of living things that Nietzsche analyzed so well: the will to live with
no other finality than self-perpetuation.
The process of their development and decline
seems natural, except for the speed. It looks like a film in fast-motion
only the cycle appears to have no beginning and no end. We come to realize
that we are looking at synthetic nature; that this lush vegetation swaying
in the wind is the product of specially created software(1). A plant
appears, then disappears without a trace, simply leaving its place to
another possibility. To another possible art work, in fact, because
the cycle of appearances and disappearances that we found so mimetic
of life, reflects the work's opening onto its own potential. What we
took for the plant's will to grow is the will of a piece under constant
evolutional pressure.
Each plant has its morphogenetic program but
given its sophistication, the computations allow a random factor in
its growth. We watch for its reappearance rather than its fading out
in vain. It will grow back, or at least its clone will, somewhere on
the screen, based on chance written into its germinal programming. Maybe
in the place where we lost it. More likely somewhere else. But it will
grow back. This "Other Nature"(2), or Super-nature, is the
contrary of a still life. It is alive. It is perennial. It is even prolific.
And this unpredictable proliferation, though it is skillfully calculated,
enchants us because it creates dream-like effects of transparency and
overlapping. Nothing to do with the distressing proliferation of invasive
plant life. We are not on the verge of chaos due to saturation of the
space. We are not faced with imminent vegetal peril. We are in a relationship
of joyous immanence with the organic. Miguel Chevalier's piece is as
intensely enjoyable as it is introspective. It takes us to a voluptuous
and languorous world of artificial paradises(3)... But are not all paradises
artificial?
We could almost forget that our wonder is due
to the growth or proliferation not of plants but rather of images that
give the illusion of it. What delights us is being caught up in the
joyously colored round of pixels. We could almost forget that what we
see at work is the transition of algorithm into image and not the evolution
of something living, from seed to plant, from vegetal DNA to scenes
of corn bursting with electric-colored chlorophyll that are born and
grow on plasma screens, on veils of tulle or in a plastic bubble. Science
has always sought to transform our phenomenological world made up of
events, accidents and sensations into models and computations in order
to make it intelligible. Modeling has its price. During the operation,
imagination, emotion and dreams are lost. With Miguel Chevalier, the
intelligible gets its own back. Calculating reason produces sensitivity
and poetry. This engenders the vegetal forms that stimulate dreams and
stretch the limits of our imagination.
It may be that these frail artificial forests
are not conducive to romantic outpourings. No Olympio(4), if one could
be found today, would choose them as confidants of his pain. It is true
that they address the senses, particularly visual perception stimulated
by their bright colors, rather than sentiment. But they gratify both
the child in us, always avid for images, and the adult amazed that such
moving fragility is born of numbers and computations.
Miguel Chevalier calls some of his fuchsia-colored
efflorescences "Digital Thoughts"(5). There is no better name
for this flora of mathematical intelligence, generated by computations
rather than digitized images taken from nature. "Digital Thoughts"
do not represent the reality that their form evokes. They simulate it,
like the scenes of trans-real corn whose morphogenesis simulates a growth
pattern borrowed from botany. The reign of synthetic nature is not the
reign of simulacra announced by Jean Baudrillard, who remains melancholically
attached to the reality it has replaced. It is that of simulation liberated
of phenomenal reality. And it is precisely to this liberation that Miguel
Chevalier's digital vegetation owes the physical and metaphysical lightness
that fascinates and seduces us. It has no ties. It is without roots
in physical earth, unanchored in the philosophical sky of ideas. It
does not signal to something beneath or beyond the image. Breaking with
centuries of theological thought on the icon, its visibility no longer
looks to the invisible. If the romantic may see it as offering no consolation,
this is because it promises nothing.
Indeed, it promises nothing beyond itself. It
makes do with offering only what it is, when it is. Yet this offer is
made in abundance, with no holding back. Like the work of art it is
merged with, it gives itself over entirely to our pleasure. Everything,
immediately. We are in the world of children's senses and the child
in us exults before colored screens and their plays on animated transparencies.
We are also in the world of the Nietzschean superhuman, delivered of
metaphysical concern with meaning. This superhuman, that is only budding
within us, takes unabashed pleasure in the fleeting beauty of forms
and is moved by their precariousness. Through the poetry of his images,
Miguel Chevalier has rendered the indifference of a world reduced to
its enchanting, seductive appearance. Nature, revealed by artifice to
its non-human truth, has nothing tragic about it here. On the contrary,
it is magic and ironically invites us to pass, like Alice, to the other
side of the screen, just as it tells us there is nothing there besides
what we see. "Digital Thoughts" and "Other Natures"
or Super-natures resolutely take art out of the domain of the metaphysical
at work in the great Western esthetics as presented by Kant, Hegel and
even Adorno. Does the time Miguel Chevalier spent in Japan have anything
to do with this distancing? It also puts an end to the requirement that
art imitates nature. Baudelaire rose up against the supposedly Aristotelian
demand for mimesis. He sang the praises of artifice and dreamed of a
paradise that would owe nothing to our disappointing reality. Elsewhere,
out of this worldÉ Beyond the world which he criticized for being too
natural. The connection stops there. Turn of the century Antiphysis
translated a philosophical disenchantment with nature, that turned into
hatred. Miguel Chevalier's "Super-natures" are the opposite:
polychromatic homage to its abundant, joyous wealth.
Whether he physically encloses it in glass and
steel constructions, or virtually inserts it in computer programs, it
is an act of love. His "Greenhouses"(6) do not let off the
pernicious perfume and suffocating morbidity of the decadents. On the
contrary, they exude an air of health and elation. The plants dance
as if to a Matissian rhythm. Because all this chromatic and rhythmic
audacity reminds us of Matisse's "Dance" and paper cutouts.
Monet too. Monet and his "Water Lilies". And of Warhol's serial
variations on flowers. Yet despite certain formal or conceptual analogies,
the creative process of "Other Natures" makes a radical break
with the history of art, that nonetheless makes its presence felt.
Gilles Deleuze said of the organic that it was
life in forms. It is enough to add: "and in colors", to understand
why Miguel Chevalier's analysis of the mutation of forms has found inspiration
in the modeling of the world of plants.
Françoise Gaillard, philosopher
1 software Musi2eye
2
Generic title that Miguel Chevalier uses to cover his works produced
and exhibited since 1992.
3 Artificial Paradises, 1994
4 "Air plays with the branch when I cryÉ" in "The Melancholy
of Olympio", Victor Hugo
5 Digital Thoughts, 1997
6 Greenhouse Effect, 1986
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