Téléprésences
Like ghostly figures haunting the space, eight structures mounted on wheels are scattered across the exhibition Muda, Muri, Mura. They’re made with a backlit Plexiglas plate on which the shadow of a brass mask appears, enhancing they’re feeling of irreality. The “bodies” are built with aluminium tubes originally conceived for office furnitures and engraved by the artists with management jargon. The Minotaur Lombardic typeface that they used evokes fantasy aesthetic and echoes some real-time strategy video games (like Age of Empires), creating a temporal clash between Middle-Age and high technology.
French artist duo Juliette Goiffon & Charles Beauté were inspired by Japanese facial sheet masks and telepresence robots skeletons, used during meetings for visio conferences or remote working. Connected to a webcam, such robots allow managers to run their tasks remotely. In some companies some rooms are set for virtual meetings, imagined as dematerialized meeting places. These robots are symptomatic of disembodiment effect happening in the corporate world but also of some kind of standardisation: both reassuring and disturbing, their glowing faces seems to look into our eyes.
