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 the machine that wants nothing to do with it. “So be it,” the French visual artist Guykayser probably said to himself, having long been locked in his studio dipping his hands in color to draw out shapes. 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 would make 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 he constrained himself to the ordinary and succeeded in giving a human voice to the web.
Tresnay, Nevers, Nannay. Three towns or villages in France visited by Guy Kayser. Three local territories displaced onto the web, where any internet user can now take a 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 objects carrying stories intact, but captured the words born from the encounter and made them the raw material of an object to be shaped. Living words, 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 revealing form of 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 on 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 (I give you my word) is the most recent of Guykayser’s story-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 story-object Je te donne ma parole uses the same elements as the previous ones: collecting living speech, carving and weaving these words, with which images of the territory where they were born are intertwined, shaping and displacing the story-object onto the web, where everyone can now project themselves into a new territory of human voices. Like the previous story-objects, Je te donne ma parole implements a fairly simple interactive process that apparently requires only a minimal investment from the user: choosing from the many and giving an order to a set seems to be their only possible actions. Yet, if they pay just a little attention to what they see and hear, they will soon have the impression of belonging to the cybernetic landscape.
On the screen of Je te donne ma parole, at the very bottom, a human community scrolls past against a winter landscape. Alone or in groups, men and women are but anonymous white silhouettes. They represent existing beings but give them 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 on an urban landscape. An apparently 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 entirely carried by the voice. A voice troubling in its humanity, but deprived of a body, except for mine, the user. And this is where the exchange initiated by Guykayser extends. The speech collected and shaped in Quebec, then engraved on the network, is given to me, whole, strangely immortal, and at the same time, I am also given the possibility of physically investing in this speech by projecting myself onto the shadow puppet. “I give you my word,” say the shadows populating the Quebec landscape in unison. In exchange, wherever I am, I give them my body.
A “collective self-portrait,” Guykayser says of each of the story-objects he has placed on the web since leaving his studio. As if he forgot that these story-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 and the internet users, the encounter was immediate, without mediation. And to a certain extent, he is right. The voice of the people of Tresnay, Nevers, Nannay, and Quebec has the purity of those that populate our daily lives. It seems to be given to us as it was heard and collected. Strolling through L’Envol du tracteur, L’Étagère de Nevers, Nannayxtérieur, or Je te donne ma parole, one will have much more the impression of listening to people telling stories than of discovering the hypermedia work of a visual artist. We will find ourselves laughing at the words heard, we will find ourselves touched by unexpected speech. With surprising ease, we enter into an ordinary conversation, the kind we have every day and will take up again tomorrow, but with people we do not know and who live in distant territories. Je te donne ma parole… en échange de ton corps invites us to enter even further into a conversation initiated by Guykayser. And one that plunges us into the heart of humanity.
