“3.5” by Kim KototamaLune, Jean-Benoist Sallé, Stéphane Baz
Title:
- 3.5
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
- ISEA2023: 28th International Symposium on Electronic Art
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More artworks from ISEA2023:
Venue(s):
Artist Statement:
3.5 offers an immersion into a fascinating world. Its mediums are glass, video projection, drop shadows and sound, with their singular, ethereal materiality. The forms exhibited, oscillating between the mathematical abstraction of perfect polygons and the organic abundance of Kim KototamaLune’s “microcosms”, serve as a metaphor for our society – liquid, virtual, ephemeral – and its paradoxes with the body and physicality.
Glass, which the artist works with amazing virtuosity by spinning it into delicate networks, also appears to be an eloquent metaphor for our society. Firstly, through its material, silica, which it shares with the silicon used for most of the computer chips that flood our planet. By its transparency too, which responds to the ideology of our time and the glassy architecture of places of power. By its fragile strength, too. Solid, but brittle, like a system that is out of breath and that, every day, gives the feeling that it is in danger of breaking.
And finally, by its virtuality. Why 3.5? Because our bodies evolve in a three-dimensional space. And yet, the world is saturated with surfaces that overwhelm them. Screens, mixed, augmented or virtual realities add a layer of information to this three-dimensionality which, from then on, seems a little more. 3.5 is therefore a way of rendering virtuality, in all the thickness that the term has gained since the internet: the virtual as what is, but on the verge of not being; the virtual as a field of possibilities; the virtual as cyberspace.
Here is 3.5, an experience in the limbo of lesser existences, the mystical attempt to touch what is beyond our senses. 3.5 is the aesthetic response to a profoundly virtual society; it is the spirit of time encapsulated in the fragile transparency of glass, in the immateriality of the projected image and the shadows cast; so many fleeting, precarious moments that hold on to nothing. 3.5 is a microcosm, populated by organisms that seem to be aquatic, a small intra-uterine theatre, the interior of the body glitched by geometries too perfect to be natural.
Other Information:
Musées de Soissons, Soissons, May 12-28
Curators: Clément Thibault & Christophe Brouard
The “3.5” exhibition is the first large-scale museum monograph devoted to Kim KototamaLune, accompanied by his collective Bones and Clouds (Jean-Benoist Sallé and Stéphane Baz).
