La température de l’information

Galleries I & II

La température de l’information is the incubator of a fictitious generative system that can be seen processing obsolete data using a series of ephemeral classification structures. Books, photographs, and plaster casts sit immersed in saltwater solutions, like encapsulated archetypal speculations.

Throughout the exhibition, the work evolves with poetic fiction qualities, giving rise to an aesthetic of accumulation and moments come and gone. The crystallization, precipitation and sedimentation processes bring about metamorphosis. Like an alchemist, the artist activates a series of reactive properties, setting in motion the sculptural becoming of the archives—which are not unlike our own active and dormant memories.

The work’s transformative potential lies in that visitors are subjected to a before and after of their presence to the work in progress. It sets up a tension between what appears to be and what will elude us over time. While locating the archives in the category of crystalized object, the artist imbues them with (re)generative power, in a sense exalting our own memory. Ultimately, the temperature of information may very well reside within us.

The duality generated by the economy of data storage—as opposed to its potential for present or future consultation—is categorized by hot data and cold data. The work addresses the growing mass of inactive information that we store, physically and virtually. This comprehensive examination of the concept of data storage comes in a context where the interplay between our biological recording systems and technological advancements are closely intertwined, for better or for worse.

With this new exhibit, Sébastien Cliche stirs the notions of memory and data beyond the cloud paradigm or other dedicated structures, shifting our understanding of it toward their perpetual becoming. More than a simple extension of his previous works, this dispositif frees the artist from any one theme in favour of a mnemonic approach to materials. The interval between the materiality of the mediums, the immaterial reality of the transduction, and the processes and materials borrowed by the artist—as he gives form to his autopoiesis project—all give birth to metaphorical connections.

Yet the question of control is omnipresent in the artist’s practice. We usually think of control in terms of a binary relationship such as controller/controlled, controllable/uncontrollable, positive control/negative control, where control is generally perceived in a negative way—too much control—or in a positive way—the need/desire for control. Through a series of gestures, the artist becomes both director and actor. At times, merely operator. In this way, Cliche situates intersubjectivity in the encounter between self-regulating systems, with or without resolution.

In La poétique de l’œuvre ouverte (1962), Umberto Eco evokes Henri Pousseur’s musical composition Scambi, where an indefinable number of macroscopic transformations evolve toward a single, indefinite climax. La température de l’information, with its performative and open-ended organic properties, appears as the outgrowth of a similar desire for transmutation. The artist activates its potential both deftly and masterfully.

Text by Maryse Morin

Authors Bio

With a background in the visual and digital arts, music and sensory anthropology, Maryse Morin engages with a diversity of forms of writing that give rise to subtle circumstantial shifts.

Artists Bio

Sébastien Cliche is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. His practice takes the form of performative installations, while also incorporating photography, textual works, video and sound creation. Through generative systems, he explores the question of control and its social and psychological ramifications. Attentive to the contradictions underlying the sense of mastery over oneself or one’s environment, he addresses this paradox by exposing the tension between movements of regulation and letting go.

His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, including in 2008 at the Centre d’art contemporain de Meymac, France; in 2010 at l’Œil de poisson, Quebec City; in 2013 at Momenta Art, New York; in 2017 at Le Lieu, Quebec City; in 2019 at AXENÉO7, Gatineau; in 2023 at VU in Quebec City; as well as at established festivals such as MUTEK in Montreal, in 2005 and 2010. He is the recipient of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in contemporary art (2012) and in 2014 he published “Doublings,” a monograph that builds on the project “La Doublure” presented at the Galerie de l’UQAM (Montreal, 2012).

Click here to visit his web page

Acknowledgements

The artist would like to thank Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and Canada Council for the Arts for their support at various stages of the conception and realization of this project.

Thanks to
Maryse Morin, generous and attentive with her eyes and words.
Émile Riopel and Marc Lalonde for their precious assistance.
The Vu (Québec) team, who trusted me in presenting the first version of this installation.
The team at CIRCA art actuel for their warm welcome.