Geoweb

In a city, cars roll, stop, slow down. There are accidents and road work. In this city, there is a man and a woman who have never met, who will fall in love, will separate, will find each other again. They speak endlessly of what should continue and what should end. What they say is a translation of traffic flow.

A software recovers Yahoo RSS feeds that follow the flow of traffic in different cities. The information is fragmented and analyzed based on a list of keywords derived from 7424 video sequences. This creates a montage that reflects the real state of circulation.

Inspired by J.G. Ballard, Circulation elaborates a parallel between lover’s discourse and the flow of cars, because this has changed our notions of intimacy and our imagination. Everything happens as if the dialogue between man and woman were becoming permeable to a series of outside events, following a counter-intuitive hypersensitivity. The unpredictable fluctuations of a meeting, of love, of separation, and of sadness, are products of an arbitrary translation. The dialogue between lovers is never-ending and variable, it escapes coherence because traffic circulation never ends.

Grégory Chatonsky holds a philosophy master’s from the Sorbonne and a multimedia advanced degree from the Ecole nationale superieure 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. His works have been acquired by public collectors such as the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie.

In 1994, Chatonsky founded a net.art collective, incident.net, and has produced numerous works, such as the websites of the Pompidou Centre and Villa Médicis, the graphic signature for the Musée contemporain du Val-de-Marne, and interactive fiction for Arte. He has taught at the Fresnoy (national modern art studio, France) and at UQAM’s school of visual and media art.

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

Born in Paris, Grégory Chatonsky currently resides in Montreal and Paris.

Production: AgenceTOPO - www.AgenceTOPO.qc.ca
Concept, text, programing & editing: Grégory Chatonsky
Acting: Mélissa Gagné & Vincent Charlebois
Translation from French to English : Patricoia Comanescu