“Earthsatz” by Pierre Lafanéchère, Dylan Cote

Title:

Earthsatz

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Artist Statement:

Arts numériques Fest Exhibition and Hacnum Exhibition Théâtre-Sénart, May 2 – June 3

Dylan Cote & Pierre Lafanéchère are ISEA2023 selected artists

visual performance made with Incogito .
30 minutes. Earthsatz also has an exhibitable version (prints + video).

To scrutinize the planet by referencing each of its facets is to seek to exhaust it, to say everything about it, to disenchant the idea of an unknown elsewhere by replacing it with a rational and immutable vision. Google Earth is a project that is both infinite and imperfect: to fit the world in a smartphone is not only to look at it as an object of scientific study, it is also to compact it. The image is imprecise, the volumes are altered, the city is silent, the cars static, life non-existent. “Hold the whole world in your hands”: a funny slogan for a strange vision of the world.

Yet the world told by Google Earth remains intriguing. The imperfections of its forms, the defects of its textures and the coldness of this representation constitute the attributes of a new, hybrid universe, more of algorithmic fiction than our tangible reality. Earthsatz seeks to amplify the cold and scary poetry generated by this “pocket world” where pixels have replaced particles.
The challenge is to succeed in contemplating this space for what it is: a fictional universe mimicking ours while developing its own autonomy, its own logic, its own physics. By in turn scanning part of the world generated by Google scans, we add a layer of information loss, greater compression and therefore amplification of its fantastic characteristics.

Earthsatz then proposes a walk in this third world whose fictional, artificial and irrational aspects are celebrated through a highlighting of its aberrations and a progressive degradation of its forms. These tormented landscapes are prolonged in dark and heavy sonorities, soundtrack of a synthetic universe in decomposition, roars of a planetary equation.