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2.
One should not trust the Deleuzian title of Rhizomes (1999)
which constitutes a decisive turning point in Reynald
Drouhins’ work, its invention or its origin so to speak. It is an
incredible spatial device, one that can produce a world up to
then im/possible. In this work, SPACE IS MADE IN MOSAIC.
Let’s briefly describe the logic process of the device: following
a localized event, the tempest of the 26th December 1999, the
artist photographed an uprooted tree in the garden of the
ENSBA. He used standard mosaic software to construct an
image of his hand using his 192 images of the tree. He then
asked 192 persons to keep one of the fragment-images on
their hard disk so that the image could be recomposed on an
HTML page on the schools’server. In other words, the site of
visibility of the image (our domestic screen) and the site of
the material memorization of the images (the geographically
distant servers) were two distinct phenomena. Separation
between memory hardware and the reading of this memory is
characteristic of digital media and results in a radical upheaval
of the conditions of retention, writing and reading 8 . The
trends towards territorialisation and deterritorialisation are
closely connected. The local and the global are not dialectically
opposed but return within each other. That spatial fractalization
is based on the transition between the representation of a
tree (arborescent and foundation) and that of a hand (intimate
exteriority): “A hand is something special (...) A hand
does not merely grab or catch, grip or push. A hand gives and
receives, though not only things, since it can be offered and
received in another hand. A hand keeps, a hand carries. A
hand traces signs, a hand signals, probably because man is a
monster.” 9
If the pixel is the visual unit of the screen, mosaic as the artist
designs it, is an image within the image playing and dis-playing
the recycling of pop media artists. The relation between
mosaic and pixel is a classic figure of the digital arts, a cliché
actually. Many, Space Invaders for instance, use this discontinuous
continuity between squares of differently colored identical
forms and a singular icon. As a unit permitting the
production of an infinity of forms through disposition in
space, the pixel is the foundation of the digital image. But
Drouhin’s singularity is that he produces a mosaic that has
the opposite significance, because by replacing the color pixel
by an image, by making the unit disappear, he makes the
history of that practice implode. Classic mosaic presents an
atomist world in which the constituent events are originally
identical and only produce difference when assembled. With
Rhizomes, the difference itself is original. The discretion and
continuity of the image no longer vary according to the difference
between the represented pattern and the representing
elements but according to the reduplication of the two, as in
the formula Duchamp favored, 1+n. The 192 children-images
no longer need to comply with the parent-image or to take on
a normalized form; one can see each of them independently
of the whole. Relations between genealogical forces in representation
(discrete units and continual figure) are reversed
because if the only origin is that of irreducibly singular images
which stay singular even when compiled, then the image is
without origin.
What is the scene of the image? Who is looking? not what but
where is he looking from? Where are the new slits of the eye,
half-opened doors to the amazement of sight? The question is
no longer to create new images but to find the image that
already exists somewhere in the databases. Artistic action
then lies in imagining processes of visual emergence that
show the importance of the context. !C! (2002) is an assembly
of webcams found on the Internet according to a logic of
iconographic recuperation. Here then? In every location the
webcam refers to? Paris? Berlin? New York? Kyoto? Here then,
or there maybe, on your screen, right in front of you? This is
not an Albertian window opening up to numerous worlds
offering a geographical mosaic because the very possibility of
that spatial mosaic throws doubt on the classical conditions
of space. Its geography is no longer given referentially, it is
incessantly emergent. Here then? Where? The temporality
associated to that recomposed/decomposed space is a
critique of real-time media. We see a non-stop digital count as
if it were indicating no other time than its own whirling. The
fantasy of immediacy during the Golf War when we were being
told something was going to happen soon, straight away, but
the count varied according to CNNs’ temporal flow. We kept
missing the appointment. To say “here!” like in front of a
radar, a video screen or a computer monitor, in which the
image may change in real-time and thus reflect changes in the
state of the referent, is actually to hope for a perfect synchronization
between a spatial indication and its actual point. It is
to dream of an absolutely identical time, of a time which