It's been two decades now that we use the internet to share information, starting from what one may now call the traditional email, right up to personal websites. In recent years we saw the rise of blogs and community sites. All these elements are now part of our daily lives. In business, a Powerpoint presentation is more appreciated than a long speech, ministers tweet their thoughts, the kids «like» each other on Facebook, everybody watches their «e-reputation».

The same period saw the development of platforms for online games, “persistent universes» where some people spend most of their time. For the typical «no life», the so called «virtual» world has become the world he most frequently visits, it's the place that brings together his friends, habits, love stories etc. Finally we need to ask whether we're downloading the online towards the offline, and with it whether it's time for a substantial recoding of the digital universe.

Uploloload proposes an investigation into the basic recoding of all things digital as a form of deciphering various worlds. It's about  the digital defeating the real, when the real in turn tries to mimic the digital. It's a manmade strategy of defeat in front of the machine's virtuous hyper dexterity.

Uploloload plays deliberately with the ambiguity of our values and with the legitimacy we attribute to our system of references. Everybody knows what's a work of art, in the same way as everybody knows what's a digital image. But if you dig further, the obviousness of the answers fades leaving space for more profound questionings. It's important to get back to the «code» of each of the elements, to their metaphorical DNA, their lowest common denominator.

There's no doubt then, that each of the artists presented in the exhibition Uploloload underline the defeat of the off-line world, that of a «diminished reality» softly being crushed within a luxurious «augmented reality».

Maxence Alcalde
[Translated by FRANK'S]

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PRESS RELEASE

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