Le futur n'est plus ce qu'il était
The future is no longer what it was is a performance-installation developed during the residency grant at GRAME's Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Prototypes Scéniques & Sonores 2023, in Lyon, France.
A double device was set up, consisting of an automated film studio on the one hand, and a video installation space on the other. The studio consisted of an isolated, soundproofed black box, whose only visible elements were a camera, a microphone, a stool and lights. The video installation space, located inside the gallery, consisted of an equivalent isolated black box, whose elements were a screen, headphones and a chair. A route was then set up with simple instructions for the audience to move from the box with the video installation to the studio.
The performance began with individual interviews in that isolated space, without time or references or other human presence. The total depersonalisation of the environment proposes a zero degree, free of stimuli, from which they were proposed to start imagining the future. A voice-over led the experience, beginning with the reading of a short manifesto and then offering the interviewees the possibility to choose between different themes (la philosophie, la technologie, l'art et l'écologie, les êtres humains, la liberté), each unfolded in a series of questions. A total of 30 people were interviewed, including artists and the GRAME public invited for the opening. Each interview lasted between 5 and 15 minutes. The video material generated during this instance became the fuel for an exhibition system in the video installation. There, the testimonies were combined and broadcast randomly, superimposed on video images taken by live cameras from different points of the planet. The combinations of testimonies and cameras were always random, generating an eternally different film, without beginning or end, in which thirty people imagine the future while behind them a version of the world occurs in the present tense and in the dislocated geography of the internet.
