Machination #3
Eight text and photomontage episodes (in French) published on French literary platform D-Fiction.fr, from 2016 to 2018
See below short summary or download the full pdf (link due soon).
Machinations are fictional experiments taking the shape of conferences or publications, where RBW stages and tells the story of her art-based research laboratories, which form a tentacular, entangled and evolutive ecosystem, both material and immaterial. Each laboratory has its distinctive formats of experience, codes, history and underlying programs or intentions as if they were autonomous… Who has got a hand on them? How do these boundless fictional machines operate? These experiments explore and even explode (not without humor or irony) the « artist fiction » codes, interweaving reality and fiction…
And beyond her own story, RBW seeks via these Machinations, to tackle the frontier of fictional speculation at play in art practice and theory, but also in other domains such as the future, economy, science, rationality, artificial intelligence, identity or even urbanism.
Machinations all address one or several of these themes and more fundamental questions such as fiction and image theory, post-truth and memory. From a literature perspective, these experiments would belong to the fairly marginal genre of “theory-fiction”.
Produced and published on about 18 months on the literature platform d-fiction.fr in 2016-18, Machination #3 unfolds in eight episodes mixing texts and photomontages, and navigating on different levels of existence…
See episodes overview above and below, or download the whole project in French (link due soon).
Machinations history:
– Machination #1 or the Spectrum of the Invisible Hand, performative conference in group-show Spooky Action at a Distance: Artes Mechanicae and Witch’s Craddle (Curator: Dimitrina Sevova and Gabriel Gee), Corner College, Zurich, 2015. Assistant: Caroline Palla.
https://www.corner-college.com/Veranstaltungen/1431122400/985
– Machination #2, conference in international symposium Second Fictions, ACTE Institute (Art, Creation, Theory, AEsthetics), Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University, 2016.
– Machination #3 (in French), theory-fiction experiment in eight episodes, d-fiction.fr, 2016-18. See below and pdf.
– Machination #4: a Story of Raphaele Bidault-Waddington between Science and Fiction (in French), keynote in research seminar Science & Fiction (dir. Manuela de Barros), Contemporary Art Dept., Paris 8 St Denis University.
Machination #3, few words of the 8 episodes (in French), text and photomontages, d-fiction.fr, 2016-18:
Episode 1: Setting the Stage
Taking shots in the city was perhaps a way of cultivating the architect’s eye as they say, with close attention to details, volumes and perspectives, but at the same time it was still something else…
Episode 2: Urban Set Up
What I observe, in this closed architectural environment, seems like a poetic and enigmatic presence.
Episode 3: Running-off the Road
What was actually going on was the process of effiction, the production of an effect of fiction, that we are just now trying to ‘de-articulate’…
Episode 4: The World of Images
A few years back, an imbroglio came about because of the Quarks protocol, a new and very successful poetic composition of images methodology improvised by the Figure-Masters…
Episode 5: Speculative Bubble
Still immersed in his daydreaming experiment, Adam had the impression of visiting his inner-space, his neural landscape, his cognitive vortex as expressed by Maurice G. Dantec, whose insane writings he had recently discovered…
Episode 6: Shadow Cabinet
Now dwelling on the case of Paris and on the verge of entering the galaxy of Greater Paris, he knew that photography was not an appropriate means to document these spaces but rather a way to carry them into fiction…
Episode 7: Retro-prospective Lab
And when the last file emerged, a simple, perfectly readable text entitled “Paris Ars Universalis”, everyone nearly fainted…
Episode 8: The Invisible Hand
In the spirit of the Storytellers, Mesopolis and Mundus Imaginalis, we instilled the presence of a hypothetical Sheherazade, who re-feeds the cognitive exploration process of the IAs…
