Gentilly
The Digital Laundry
16 Oct → 10 Oct 2021
Wednesday to Friday from 1.30pm to 6.30pm, until 7pm on Saturdays and Sundays.
A distant cousin of the Gaîté Lyrique, the Lavoir Numérique is a place dedicated to digital sound and image, installed in the premises of former shower baths dating from 1924. In 2020, the Arteo architectural firm gave new life to this old building, which has been renovated since the 2000s. What could be better than an exhibition to inaugurate such a place? "Shared screens" opens the ball with the DIAPH 8 collective, invited to reflect on the mutation of photography and its integration into the Web. How can two revolutionary mediums, one historical and the other modern, be so intertwined, or even inseparable? The practitioners and photographers of DIAPH 8 are artists from the Photography and Contemporary Art course at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis. They all ask themselves the question of the progressive integration of photography to the Web and to the new economic models, social relationships and modes of management and consumption that this implies. For it is true that in 200 years, photography no longer has the same usefulness, especially since the arrival of the Internet! It has become a digital object in its own right, a mode of electronic recording that produces data. The photographic image, as the historian André Gunthert points out, has become a "fluid object". The exhibition is accompanied by a publication in an attempt to better understand the phenomenon. Judith Bormand studies the link between paper photography and the machine used to make it. Machines that are now digital, as Rafael Serrano points out. Infinitely reproducible, we are confronted with an inexhaustible source of images on the web which is "an open, abundant and common source" for Lorraine Lefort. Pablo-Martín Córdoba questions the economy of this enormous quantity of photographs circulating on the web. Manon Giacone shows how an interface can determine the framework of a narrative. Pernelle Popelin questions collective memory and the representation of an event within the flow on the Internet. Claire Béteille notes the amplification of egocentric postures that can be seen through a selfie. Finally, for Julia Amarger and Amélie Cabocel, the image we convey on social networks conditions our perception of others and our conception of ourselves.