" Technophobia" ... in the (Web Site and) CD ROM of that name by digital artist Dooley Le Cappellaine. The word refers to new media that immerses viewers in various phobias, The Object? To demonstrate how this format broadens our perceptions of "real" and "delusionary" fears - this work reminds us of the link between terror and beauty....."
(Norman Weinstein, Wired Magazine)

www.lecappellaine.com

Choosing "Technophobia" as the title for a CD-ROM featuring interactive multimedia works at first appears to be paradoxical - counting on our attraction to new technologies and at the same time highlighting our anxieties about them. But this ambivalence towards new technologies perfectly captures the underlying theme of this CD- ROM.

"Enerergetic and refreshingly rough edged, Technophobia is an exhibit of a dozen or so mostly interactive computer mediated contemporary artworks. Light years away from the hermetic superrealism and fractual abstractions of the Siggraph trade show variety, the work on this disk - from the disorienting subterranean space of Alan Koninger's "Megalopolis" to the mega-corporate magic realism of Guillaume Wolf and Genevieve Gauckler's "RGBforce" - displays a raw, confrontational energy ... Drawing on underground film, performance and pop culture, this work is spontaneous and disruptive in a way that feels low tech even at it's most synthetic..."
(Frank Lanz ID magazine, Nov 96)

 

Dooley Le Cappellaine

The vision behind the project
I think that this new technology offers the most exciting thing happening in contemporary art today. On this CD I worked with other artists who ranged the whole gamut from those with no computer experience at all to those who had training in specialised tertiary institutions. I was interested in this technology as a way to move away from an engagement with self referential art practice with its repetitive and increasingly claustrophobic rationale; as a sort of third base after conceptual and neo-conceptual art making; as something other than arrangements of form according to taste.

I'm using the technology to transcend the limitations of physics, finance and time inherent in other exhibition methods. The exhibitions exist on CD-ROM and the Web. One of the most exciting things about working with this technology is that art becomes more experiential and less a kind of expensive home decorating.

I've felt for a long time that art has to go outside itself, that deconstruction has worked itself out as a modus operandi. For me working with digital technology provides the freedom to create something almost indefinable but which reflects the obsessions of my generation - cinema, popular culture, cutting edge art and electronic culture.