“Fragments of stories concerning various aspects of the gift are collected and interwoven with images of the city. The artist thus seeks to find the simplicity and universality of human speech. The user moves through a group of individuals represented by white silhouettes parading against a winter landscape, ready to deliver their reflections.”
Choose one of the white shadows moving by and listen to them by clicking on their buttonhole.
A cybernetic self-portrait of humanity.Or Guykayser’s stroll through the ordinary world.
Julie Bouchard in Archée http://archee.qc.ca/March 2004
So many reproaches have been leveled at the computer screen: too flat, too cold, too hard, it has been said and repeated with an ever-disappointed air, the body pitted against a machine that wants nothing to do with it. “So be it,” French visual artist Guykayser likely said to himself, having long been shut away in his studio dipping his hands in color to pull out forms. When he decided to create for the electronic screen and even for the web, he quickly realized that he could no longer use his hands as before. But once out of his studio, he also saw that he now had a tool that would allow him to infinitely extend the encounters he made during his strolls. Knowing cybernetic space to be immaterial, odorless, and decentered, Guykayser did not try to recreate matter or define a center there, but instead committed himself to the ordinary and succeeded in giving the web a human voice.
Tresnay, Nevers, Nannay. Three towns or villages in France visited by Guy Kayser. Three local territories displaced onto the web, where any user can now stroll (www.autoportrait.com). First Tresnay, where the artist’s tractor took flight (L’Envol du tracteur; 2000). An ordinary village where ordinary people speak ordinary words. To Guykayser, who came to meet them, they spoke of objects drawn from the center of their lives. The artist left the story-bearing objects intact but captured the words born from the encounter and made them the raw material for an object to be shaped. Living speech—moving, vibrating with emotion and memory—he carved them as he would have carved wood, glass, acrylic, or metal. From each, he brought out the brilliance, the hollow, the radiance, knowing them to be as banal in their everydayness as they are timeless in their essence. He then assembled them all, interweaving images and movements, seeking the form that reveals the territory where they were born. From ephemeral and fleeting, the speech of the people of Tresnay thus took on a timeless plastic form. Specific to a local territory, it now migrates onto the web, like that of the people of Nevers (L’Étagère de Nevers; 2001) and Nannay (Nannayxtérieur; 2002). Or like that, recently, of the people of Quebec City.
Je te donne ma parole is the most recent of Guykayser’s narrative-objects. Developed during a residency at La Chambre Blanche (January 17 to February 20, 2004), Je te donne ma parole extends the stroll into the territory of Quebec City, which thus joins Tresnay, Nevers, and Nannay on the network. The narrative-object Je te donne ma parole uses the same elements as the previous ones: the collection of living speech, the carving and weaving of these words—interwoven with images of the territory where they were born—and the shaping and displacement of the narrative-object onto the web, where everyone can now project themselves into a new territory of human voices. Like the previous narrative-objects, Je te donne ma parole employs a fairly simple interactive process that apparently requires only a minimal investment from the user: choosing from the crowd and giving an order to a set of elements seems to be their only possible actions. Yet, if they pay even a little attention to what they see and hear, they will soon feel as though they belong to the cybernetic landscape.
On the screen of Je te donne ma parole, at the very bottom, a human community parades against a winter landscape. Alone or in groups, men and women are but anonymous white silhouettes. They represent existing beings but are given neither name nor face. It is up to the user to choose whom they want to hear. A simple choice confirmed by the mouse extracts one or more silhouettes from the plural and gives them a more precise context: a street, a crossroads, a park… The silhouette becomes a character, a shadow puppet against an urban landscape. A seemingly hollow shadow, it is filled with words that will flow in the order given by the user. A story is then heard, offered to be shared. Brief and always ordinary, it is carried entirely by the voice. A voice disturbingly human, yet deprived of a body, except for mine, the user’s. And this is where the exchange initiated by Guykayser extends. The speech collected and shaped in Quebec City, then engraved on the network, is given to me, whole, strangely immortal, and at the same time, I am given the possibility to physically inhabit this speech by projecting myself onto the shadow puppet. “I give you my word,” say the shadows populating the Quebec landscape in unison. I, in exchange, wherever I may be, give them my body.
“Collective self-portrait,” Guykayser says of each of the narrative-objects he has placed on the web since leaving his studio. As if he forgot that these narrative-objects were sound and visual renderings of what he had seen and heard during his strolls. As if he wanted to believe that between the people of Tresnay, Nevers, Nannay, or Quebec City and the users, the encounter was immediate, without mediation. And to a certain extent, he is right. The voices of the people of Tresnay, Nevers, Nannay, and Quebec City have the purity of those that populate our daily lives. They seem to be given to us just as they were heard and collected. Strolling through L’Envol du tracteur, L’Étagère de Nevers, Nannayxtérieur, or Je te donne ma parole, one feels much more like listening to people tell stories than discovering the hypermedia work of a visual artist. One might laugh at the words heard or find oneself touched by unexpected speech. With surprising ease, one enters an ordinary conversation, the kind we have every day and will have again tomorrow, but with people we do not know and who live in distant territories. Je te donne ma parole… in exchange for your body invites us to enter even further into a conversation initiated by Guykayser. One that plunges us into the heart of humanity.
