Self-operating Machines in the Art Practice of Philippe Parreno

For at least the past decade, artists have utilized diverse media to reconceive the art exhibition as simultaneously an object and vehicle for theoretical reflection on artmaking itself, on the conditions determining the appearance and possibility of art, on the formats and the modes of action it entails, and on its institutional status. In many cases, the display of such exhibitions depends not only upon the employment of new technologies (mechanical, digital, biological); rather, technology undergirds and activates programs whose interfaces manifest material contents and immaterial contexts that take the form of experiential eco-systems and/or bio-semiotic environments. These exhibition projects take place in heterotopic public spaces (various museum settings, parks, gardens, urban spaces) which are critically reactivated by artistic practices interested in the “performativity” of the processes involved in constructing the exhibition’s physical setting and “prefiguring” the experience of the spectator. We propose to investigate how, in Philippe Parreno’s work, certain exhibition spaces come to function as sensitive autopoietic environments, and how within these environments the sensorium, fictionality, narration, the conceptual and anthropological dimensions of the image, and production/experimentation with “reality” still pass through an interrogation of the conditions of probability – situated, historical, and cultural – of contemporary art in all its forms.