BlueriderDaily |學術評論 Pascal Dombis by Dr. Dominique Moulon

Dr. Dominique Moulon

為法國知名藝術史學家、藝評家及策展人,專研法國數位藝術領域。著有《當代新媒體藝術》和《超越數位的藝術》等書。Dominique Moulon先後於法國布爾日國立高等藝術學院、巴黎第八大學修習藝術學位,並於2017年獲得巴黎第壹萬神殿 – 索邦大學藝術與科學博士學位。曾任教於知名學府帕森設計學院巴黎分校,自2007 年以來壹直是芝加哥藝術學院的定期訪問講師。先後於法國蒙特勒伊梅森大眾藝術中心、巴黎國際藝術城及巴黎加拿大文化中心擔任策展人,並為法國雜誌《Images Magazine》、《Art press》數位藝術專欄撰稿。

作品中的组合

by Dr. Dominique Moulon

在 The Art of Combinations (1666) 論文中,Leibnitz討論到將可變性定義為“所有變異總量”時,他認為此基本前提是“不論數量,所有的事物皆可考慮,然後再將其視為一個整體”。Pascal Dombis 的作品是由無數的線條、文字、與影像組合而成,其中不同元素所組合的固有可變性則由演算公式來處理。在“Irrational Geometrics”系列中,無論使用的介質為何、不論其尺寸是否從幾公分至幾十米,線條被大量地縫合在一起。以 Hegel 於 Introduction to Aesthetics 中的描述來說明藝術中關於美的概念,說明當這些“抽象形式”受“規律限制”時;或更準確地說,當這些抽象形式受制於藝術家在工作室中構思的演算法時,這些形式早在軟體完全無視框架的情況下進行系統性計算之前,很快地幾乎被它們的交錯模式所淹沒。假設藝術家接著拿起錘子與鑿子來改變它們隨後的回旋,也可說是為了恢復對於當下情況的掌握。例如,在他的玻璃作品中,某些地方被以工具擊碎並激起了新的變化,借此於媒介中增加裂痕以成為潛在發展的路徑,並且使這樣的發展讓機器能夠繼續延續進行處理。

當妳凝視“Meta-Aura”系列作品時,妳將無法抗拒地迷失於作品表面,因為我們無法抑制被光影所蒙蔽的雙眼,目光無法永遠固定壹處。這些圖像體現了藝術家對於熔合形式簡易性與進行過程中激進性質之間的癡迷,無休止地以獨立的細節與難以覺察的方式重復他的曲直線條。然而這樣的作品名稱,Dombis 也在影射 Walter Benjamin 對於光暈(aura)的觀點。根據理論學者的說法,藝術作品無法被領會,僅能“於它所在的地方呈現存在的獨特性”。Dombis以數位媒介為工具,即使他比誰都清楚知道他們的可重復性有多高;然而,他的藝術作品始終是獨壹無二的,因為它們正是可以無止境產出所呈現出來的生成結果。它們的獨特性因為藝術家的選擇而被保證,在特定時刻,各種素材產出結果的當下,它們便在該空間中向全世界展示自我。

Rosalind Krauss 在 Grids 這篇具開創性的文章中說明著:“在本世紀初始之時,先是出現於法國、然後是俄羅斯、接著出現於荷蘭,網格這種結構從那時起便壹直是視覺藝術中現代主義野心的象征。先是浮現於戰前立體派畫作之中,接著顯得更加嚴苛與明顯;除了其他事物以外,網格宣示著對現代藝術的沈默意誌以及它對文學、敘事、與話語的敵意。”Dombis 從網路上追蹤網格的視覺呈現,並搜集了數以萬計的網格以覆蓋他的參與式裝置“Mixed_Grill€”中的墻壁空間。相互交織後,這些網格便形成壹個表面,使觀眾能夠透過光柵板仔細觀察,並從這多重閱讀層之間進行探索。再壹次地,人類的手在這些裝置之中扮演著關鍵角色,因為它在這壁畫數據庫之中來回地徘徊;如同60年代晚期Andy Warhol 在洛杉磯郡立美術館中Maurice Tuchman 所設立的藝術與科技計劃中首次實驗式地呈現使用光柵的技術。這當然是一個不同的世代,但是當時的藝術家們已經開始著手探索他們那個時代的新奇科技。值得注意的是,Dombis 在後網路時代於波普藝術傳統中刻寫他累積的創作姿態,並把選擇權留給機器去處理。他的網格或圖像是經由演算法處理的,但是最原始的激進意圖仍然存在,因為它們代表了對於線性敘事的一種不妥協替代方案。

然而,文字在 Pascal Dombis 的藝術實驗中是最重要的元素。他從機器深處發現代碼與演算法的自我展現、抑或於伺服器的數據中心裏不厭煩地以重復的文本持續發送指示。他甚至搜集了數十萬個 Google 索引視覺元素,只因為它們代表了我們的日常人工智慧。但是,當妳在 Google 搜尋引擎中輸入“Google”之後,下個步驟是什麽呢?這種有點絕望的探索—以十分猛烈的方式—清楚表明了藝術家測試與感受他所建立的系統極限能力。一瞬之間,就在上述內容中,在Rosalind Krauss 所提到的“沈默”完成之前,藝術家便已停止搜尋,超越了任何形式的過渡。我們因此不再處理文本,而改以處理文本性;或者更確切地說,從語言的掙紮之中滲出的一些質地。當文字轉變成圖像時,這與 Edouard Glissant 所描述的沒有太大的不同:“語言即是我們的風景”。

早在1998年,Nicholas Negroponte 便表明數位革命的世代已經結束。在這種情況下,除了以前綴詞“後…”的方式,我們該如何描述現在所生活的全數位社會呢?在這個後世代中,那些我們習慣將曾經犯過的錯歸咎於機器的情況,現在已經變得十分完美。這些機器變得越來越不令人驚奇或困惑—也就是說,只要它們不落入像是 Pascal Dombis 這類陶醉於偶然機緣的藝術家之手中。例如,他事先並不知道他的“Post Digital Mirrors”作品表面將如何反映世界。事實上,這些作品並沒有映射任何實質性的東西,而是反映了當過程被推至極限時,永遠不會陷入困境的意外情境。甚至可以說,這些作品確實呈現了單色畫所達到的那種寂靜。意外的可變性發生在藝術家“Post Digital Mirrors”作品的表面上,使它們看起來像皺褶那般,將我們送回 Gilles Deleuze 的哲學與他對 Leibnitz 的解釋:“混沌並不存在;它是壹種抽象,因為它無法從篩網或熒幕上分離出來使事物浮現 (並非壹無所有)。”這所謂的“事物”,正是從藝術家掌控、甚至是機器控制之中逃離出來的東西。它的輪廓有時看起來像是指示距離的地形曲線,當我們追求絕美事物之時,暴露我們解碼路上困境的決心。

作家兼哲學家 Eric Sadin 認為自己:“某部份是帶有政治意圖的作家,使用著 George Orwell 的美麗辭藻來表達;某部份是一位吹哨者,並非為了必須揭露隱藏的不道德行為而寫作,而是作為壹種智慧型企業,用來辨識與重組那些分散但收斂的標誌,這些標誌違背了既得民主權利且鼓勵危害人類尊嚴的政治犯罪。”同樣地,當 Pascal Dombis 專註於數位時代中的控制觀點時,他可以被形容為一位政治藝術家。在當代藝術中不可避免的白色方塊之中,他毫不猶豫地將作品表面塗黑,將它們置於構成“控制”一詞的字母語境之中。如同 George Orwell 所著的《1984》壹書中 Syme 說的:“我們將語言切至入骨”。這不就是 IBM 與 Apple 早在 Google 與 Facebook 加入戰局之前就開始的事嗎?他們強迫著我們使用可控制且刪除的按鈕。單以 CTRL 控制鍵便足以使 Dombis 的藝術作品運轉起來。Orwell 在他的時代無法想像的一切,現在正在成為事實;因為我們極度地渴望獲得 Warhol 般的名氣,而且,為了建立最好的世界這種崇高理想,我們將私生活大範圍地交給企業伺服器,真心誠意地希望能滿足我們最小的期待。

On Combinations at Work

Dr. Dominique Moulon

In the Essay on the Art of Combinations (1666) Leibnitz’s basic premise is that “it is possible to consider things, however numerous, and take the whole as one” before defining variability as the “quantity of all variations”. Pascal Dombis’s artworks are the results of myriads of lines, texts and images combined together, and the variability inherent in the different elements combined is taken care of by calculators. In the Irrational Geometrics series, lines are stitched together in vast numbers, no matter what the nature of the media used might be, whatever their size, from a few centimetres to dozens of metres. When these “abstract forms” are “subjected to laws”, to use Hegel’s phrase in his Introduction to Aesthetics dealing with the concept of Beauty in Art, or more precisely when these abstract forms are subjected to algorithms conceived by the artist in his studio, long before software programmes carry out the calculations systematically with a total disregard for the frames, soon virtually overwhelmed by their interlacing patterns. If the artist then grasps a hammer and a chisel to alter their ensuing circumvolutions, it is maybe to resume control over what is going offhand. In his glass pieces, for instance, some of the layers are cracked by hand tools that provoke new accidents, adding crackles into the medium that become companions on the potential vagrant routes that the code allows machines to take.

When you gaze at the works in the Meta-Aura series, you irresistibly get lost along their surfaces because our unquenchable eyes, alternatively blinded by lights and shadows, are never fixed. The prints crystallize the artist’s obsession to fuse the simplicity of forms with the radical nature of the process under way, endlessly repeating his curvaceous straight lines with discrete details, hardly perceptible. But with such a title, Dombis is also alluding to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the Aura. According to the theoretician, a work of art cannot be apprehended but in “the uniqueness of its existence at the place where it stands”. Dombis is working with digital media and although he knows better than anyone else how excessively reproducible they are, his art pieces are unique because they are precisely the results of generative processes that can churn them out endlessly. Their uniqueness is guaranteed by the artist’s choice, at the very moment when various materials generate them, in the very space where they reveal themselves to the world.

Rosalind Krauss wrote in her seminal essay on Grids: “In the early part of this century there began to appear, first in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition in the visual arts ever since. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” Dombis has tracked down visual occurrences of the grid on the Internet and collected tens of thousands of them to cover the walls of the spaces where his participatory installation Mixed_Grill(e) happens to take place. When interlaced all together, these grids form a surface that the audience can scrutinize with the help of lenticular plates and probe in its multiple reading layers. Once again, the human hand has a key role in these installations because it hovers over the mural data bank while the lenticular sends us back to Andy Warhol’s first experimentations with this material in the Art and Technology Program set up by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the late 60s. This was of course a totally different era, but artists were already laying their hands on the technological novelties of their days. It is remarkable that Dombis inscribes his accumulative creative gesture within the pop art tradition in a post-Internet age, when making choices is left to machines. His grids or patterns are algorithmic but the original radical intention is still there because they represent an uncompromising alternative to linear narratives.

Yet, texts are most essential in Pascal Dombis’s artistic experimentations. He finds them in the depths of his machines where codes and algorithms express themselves, or in the servers’ data centres that he titillates with relentlessly repeated textual requests. He even goes as far as to collect hundreds of thousands of Google-indexed visuals simply because they would represent our everyday artificial intelligence. But what is the next search step once you have keyed “Google” in your Google search engine? This somewhat hopeless quest speaks volumes for the artist’s capacity to test and feel – with a vengeance – the limits of the systems he has set up. In a split second, just before the “silence” mentioned above by Rosalind Krauss is completed, the artist stops the search, beyond any form of excess. We are then no longer dealing with texts but with textuality or rather with some texture oozing from the struggle with language that is not so dissimilar to what Edouard Glissant writes when text becomes image: “Languages are our landscapes”.

As early as 1998, Nicholas Negroponte said the digital revolution was over. In that context, how can we describe the all-digital society we live in with anything but the prefix –post? In this post-era, the machines that we were accustomed to blame for the errors they used to make have now become quite faultless. They have become less and less surprising or puzzling – that is to say, provided they are not in the hands of artists such as Pascal Dombis who revel in serendipity. He never knows beforehand, for instance, how the surfaces of his Post Digital Mirrors are to reflect the World. As a matter of fact, they do not reflect anything material but the accidents that the process never fails to get stuck into, when pushed to its limits. It could even be said that they do achieve the kind of silences that monochrome paintings achieve. The variability of the accidents taking place on the surfaces of his post digital mirrors makes them appear as folds, which sends us back to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and his interpretation of Leibnitz: “Chaos as such does not exist; it is an abstraction since it cannot be detached from a sieve/ a screen that makes something emerge (something rather than nothing)”. That “something” is precisely what evades the artist’s control and even, sometimes, the machines’. Its contours sometimes look like topographical curves indicating distances and exposing our determination to decipher what comes our way when we are in quest for the sublime.

Writer and philosopher Eric Sadin now considers himself “partly a writer with a political purpose, to use George Orwell’s beautiful phrase, and partly a whistle-blower who does not write out of a necessity to expose hidden reprehensible deeds that should be revealed, but as an intellectual enterprise consisting in identifying and regrouping scattered but converging signs that go against acquired democratic rights and encourage political crimes against human dignity.” Likewise, Pascal Dombis can be described as a political artist when he focuses on the notion of control in the digital age. Inside the inevitable white cube of contemporary art, he does not hesitate to blacken the surfaces of works, contextualizing them with the letters that form the word “CONTROL”. “We cut language to the bone”, says Syme in George Orwell’s 1984. Isn’t it what I.B.M. and Apple initiated, long before Google or Facebook joined the waggon, when they forced us to use buttons that both control and delete? The sheer CTRL command key is enough to get Dombis’s art going. What Orwell could not conceive in his own days is now becoming reality because of our immoderate desire to reach Warhol-like fame and by giving away whole swathes of our private lives to corporate servers that, for the noble goal of building the best of worlds, earnestly and faithfully anticipate the fulfilment of our slightest expectations.

Pascal Dombis 帕斯卡尔·多比斯
(法国, b. 1965)

法国国立里昂应用科学学院主修工程科学学位,美国波士顿塔夫茨大学修习电脑艺术。现居住及创作于巴黎。出身工程及电脑科学的Pascal Dombis为法国知名数位艺术家,90年代开始利用电脑演算法作为创作手法,透过撰写简单的程式编码,让电脑进行重複性运算,操作不同变项而产出不同的视觉影像,透过立体光栅的叠合,作品呈现特殊未来感。Dombis有丰富的国际展览经历,包含巴黎大皇宫(Grand Palais)「艺术家与机器人」展,55届威尼斯双年展官方卫星展「Noise」,法国文化部于巴黎皇家宫殿(Palais Royal)委託客製现地计画「Text(e)s~Fil(e)s」,巴黎白昼之夜(La nuit Blanche),义大利阿克里当代艺术博物馆等。作品由台湾国巨基金会,布达佩斯美术馆、日本大型企业Seiko Epson Corp. Canon Inc.,韩国大邱美术馆等重要机构永久收藏。

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