Grégory Chatonsky’s body of work, including interactive installations, networked and urban devices, photo-graphs and sculptures, speaks to the relationship between technologies and affectivity, the flow that defines our time and attempts to create new forms of fiction.

The Invention of Destruction – Grégory Chatonsky’s work is inspired by the increasing aesthetization of the destruction in the mass medias and it questions the relation between a form and a matter. The three bodies of work shown in the exhibition are Dislocation II (2006), Dislocation III (2007), Enemy II (2008), I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself (2008) and Readonlymemories (2003).

Dislocation II is a series of photographs, videos and sculptures representing house and office’s furniture in various state of disintegration. When a destroyed object isn’t recognizable any more? This series questions the abstraction and the representation by slowing down to the extreme the dislocation of the objects. The dislocated pieces of furniture are produced from the same computer’s files that are then translated in synthesis’ process and stereo lithography.

Dislocation III has the same approach than Dislocation II. How do we feel if we see a street disintegrated? The city, the streets the sidewalks on which the pedestrians and Millions of flaneurs walked throughout the centuries. The asphalt is churned up, tattered, detached like the fragments of an iceberg drifting off. The patchwork in the images reveals the strong meaning safe ground does have to us.

Enemy II uses as source the photo work of J.-M. Charcot, a 19th century French photographer who photographed hysterical persons. I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself is an interactive installation which allows the visitor to scan his fingerprint and see his image slowly evolve. The fingerprints are drifting as icebergs on the screen. Readonlymemories is an examination of the known and the unknown in films. We have all seen the apartment building in Rear Window, Dorothy’s bedroom in Blue Velvet and the twin brothers from Dead Ringers, yet we have never actually seen them on the screen.

Gregory Chatonsky is born 1971 in Paris, holds a philosophy master’s from the Sorbonne and a multimedia advanced degree from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. He has worked on numerous solo and group projects in France, Canada, the United States, Italy, Australia, Germany, Finland and Spain. He has taught at the Fresnoy (national modern art studio, Tourcoing, France) and at UQAM’s school of visual and media art (Québec). His works have been acquired by public collectors such as the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. In 1994, Chatonsky founded a pioneering net.art collective, incident.net, and has produced numerous prestigious works, such as the websites of the Centre Pompidou and Villa Médicis, Rome, the graphic signature for the Musée contemporain du Val-de-Marne, and interactive fiction for Arte. Grégory Chatonsky currently lives in Montréal and Paris.