Psychic
Antoine Schmitt, 2004
Interactive installation
Computer, specific program, surveillance camera, videoprojector, loudspeakers
Exists in french and english
Creation : Exhibition Invisibile, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (IT) – October 9th 2004 – January 9th 2005 – Curator : Emmanuele Quinz
Psychic sees the spectators and describes what she sees using phrases written on the wall. The text is printed letter by letter like by a typewriter which we can also hear.
Psychic perceives the world a bit differently than we do : she has a bad sight but she is very sensitive to the internals states and to the motivations of the spectators.
In the artwork “Postscript / The Passenger” of Pierre Bismuth, a typewriter subjectively describes an invisible but audible movie.Psychic subjectively describes its own reality which is the one of the exhibition space.
With Psychic, I meant to proceed to a double inversion. First, an inversion of museum mechanism in the sense where here it is the artwork that watches the spectator. Who watches him really, with a camera, a perceptive system and a cognitive and interpretative system. The spectator only sees the result of this analytic process in the form of symbols : text that represents her, here and now.
With Psychic, I meant to proceed to a double inversion. First, an inversion of museum mechanism in the sense where here it is the artwork that watches the spectator. Who watches him really, with a camera, a perceptive system and a cognitive and interpretative system. The spectator only sees the result of this analytic process in the form of symbols : text that represents her, here and now.
Also, there is an inversion of my usual artistic process. Whereas in general, I create artworks in which I play with the opacity between causes and effects by playing with the scientific posture, and where I immerse the spectator in an attention and a search for causalities, with Psychic it is the opposite. Here, it is the artwork that tries to find elements of causality in the world that surrounds her, that is in the museum space, and in the wanderings of the spectators. In a quasi-paranoïd posture, the invisible creature tries to make sense of the actions that she perceives.
In the continuity of my work, Psychic is a programed artwork, in which the medias that are used (fragments of images — letters — and fragments of sound) only serve as a link between the spectator and the process at work. The essence of the work is in the mechanism that happens here and now. I want to confront the spectator to this mechanism through image and sound, conspicuous emanations of hidden sufferings.
In the end, the spectator searches for the cause of this mechanism which itself searches for the cause of mechanism of the spectator.
Antoine Schmitt August 2004
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