Taking as her starting point the question “can images heal us ?”, artist Lauren Huret continues her visual and theoretical research into the affects created by images.
Entitled L’hypnose du jardin, this new video was created using photographs taken in the wooded park next to her home in Geneva. These images were then modified and augmented using Dall-e software from OpenAI, a company that generates images from text commands.
This 21-minute video loop, with no beginning or end, is shown continuously in ORBIT_E, MBAL’s digital exhibition space. The landscapes are evolving : they follow one another and are transformed, appearing and disappearing slowly, punctuated by small hallucinations and other visions that metamorphose.
The artist has chosen to construct this video as close as possible to visual and aural hypnosis, with the intention that we might fall asleep in front of it. Contrary to the injunctions to pay attention and be alert, the images proposed here are deliberately soporific, as a response to the immediacy, accessibility and acceleration of online images. Here, you can project your imagination and begin your ascent towards the phases of dreaming.
As sources of iconographic inspiration, the artist also took a long look at fantasized representations of Eden in the Christian imagination. In this “artificial paradise”, Lauren Huret creates a fantastically strange, almost alien garden, imagined by this strange woman-machine alliance.
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Biography :
Born in 1984 in Levallois-Perret (FR), Lauren Huret lives and works in Geneva. Her visual work and research, consisting mainly of videos, installations, performances and collages, attempt to shed light on the belief systems intrinsic to our technical and media devices. She regularly collaborates with the Swiss artist Maria Guta, who lives and works in Neuchâtel. Together, they will be exhibiting at the Swiss Art Awards in Basel in June 2023.
Her work has been exhibited at Kunsthaus Langenthal, Hard Hat gallery in Geneva, La Panacée in Montpellier, Copenhagen Contemporary art museum, Centre d’art contemporain in Geneva, Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, Fondation Ricard, Haus der Elektronischen Künste in Basel, Jeu de Paume in Paris, Red Brick museum in Beijing, Centre d’art contemporain in Neuchâtel and numerous independent art spaces. Her performances have been shown at the Prix Suisse pour la performance at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, at the Théâtre de l’Usine in Geneva, at the Les Urbaines festival at the Arsenic in Lausanne, and at the LAAC in Dunkirk.
She has published five books to date, including Praying for my haters, ed. CCS Paris, February 2019, L’âge des techniciens, with Pacôme Thiellement, ed. Clinamen, June 2017, Artificial fear, Intelligence of Death, ed. Link, co-pub. Kunsthaus Langenthal, April 2016.
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Credits :
Video : Lauren Huret
Sound creation : Flexfab et Lauren Huret
Website : Sacha Béraud
MBAL curation : Séverine Cattin
The artist would like to warmly thank : Sacha Béraud, Maria Guta, Pablo Fernandez, Hunter Longe, Nan Hill, Séverine Cattin and the MBAL.
This Wort is dedicated to Brian Longe.
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