Artist Statement
Installation
On a public display, a news ticker continuously shows news in scrolling text. The news items are, however, conjugated in the future tense: ‘the NASDAQ will drop 4.3 points today’, ‘A plane will crash in Madrid killing 153 people’, ‘The Giants will crush the Red Socks 10–3’. Aside from the tense of the verbs, all the news is completely true… TIME SLIP is a visual artwork anchored in philosophical questionings about destiny, its potentially predetermined nature and its causal determinism. It is also a work about free will in a universe where time and causality can ‘slip’. It confronts the spectator with the control of his or her own destiny. It is also a work engaging with the motifs of unpredictability and risk, which are increasingly central in the contemporary world. TIME SLIP is based on custom-built software that feeds from official news agencies, changing the tense of selected news items from near past to near future. TIME SLIP is always current. It is a programmed generative artwork.
- Artist and programming engineer Antoine Schmitt creates installations, situations and objects, minimal and abstract, anchored in time and movement, that address the
modalities of the free being in the system of reality. With reference to a systemic contemporary world, Schmitt places programming, an artistic medium that he considers radically new because of its active dimension, at the core of most of his artworks to challenge the forces in play, and their form. He has, alone or through collaborations, fostered confrontations with this approach in more established artistic fields like music, dance, architecture, literature and cinema, whose codes he re-examines. He has collaborated with Vincent Epplay, Jean-Jacques Birgé, Atau Tanaka, Anne Holts and Jean-Marc Matos, Alberto Sorbelli, Joana Preiss, Juha Marsalo and others. As a theorist, jury spokesman, and editor of the gratin.org portal, Schmitt explores the field of programmed art. Antoine Schmitt lives and works in Paris. gratin.org/as
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