David Guez is a digital artist who resides in Montreuil. His work focuses on the social links and the relationship between time and memory. We talked to him about the latter, even though he just showed his work at the Centre Pompidou and one of his projects is presented in the virtual gallery at the Jeu de Paume.
Does a digital artist always program their installations?
Not always. Personally, I do it a lot because I studied computer science and learned several languages. After studying computer science, I went to beau-arts to become an artist. At the end of the 1990s, I veered towards the Internet. I started working on the relationships between virtual streams and real space. At the beginning of the 21st century, I started to become more interested in the medias present on the Web. This is when I created a Web TV dedicated to contemporary art. The site opened and anybody could send me their creations.
How did you start your work on memory and time?
In reality, my work on television and online consisted of creating matrixes that received and stored contents. This is how I began to question the continuity of information. I wanted to do the opposite of real-time. I started a series called 2067 where the first work was a Website that lets users send messages to the future. I stored the contents in a text file because I thought that the SQL (Structured Query Language) formats weren’t necessarily permanent. I encoded the data in order to respect the confidentiality of the emails. Every day, a clock processes the emails to be sent. The system was installed on a server that has been copied to assure its survival until 2067, at least…
Why this date?
100 years after my birth: it’s a symbolic boundary. Maybe the date of my death… I then varied the concept with a radio and phone booths. The principle didn’t change, but it wasn’t online. I question the fragility of new medias and supports. I created a work on this idea: a hard drive on paper. It consisted of printing a book containing the binary code of a file. I started with Méliès’ film A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) and then La Jetée by Chris Marker. I materialized the files in a paper format to give them a better chance for survival.
Is materializing digital technology your new avenue of exploration?
Yes. Right now I’m working on digital land art installations on the same theme. I am going to encrypt an image file of the Mona Lisa with trees. In practical terms, I will put zeros and ones on the tree trunks in a forest. I worked out that I will need about 8,000 trees. The goal of this research is to invent vitrification methods for the virtual in the real world.
To find out more: www.guez.org | Jeu de Paume virtual space