{"id":21112,"date":"2012-03-13T16:07:28","date_gmt":"2012-03-13T08:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benayoun.com\/moben\/2012\/03\/13\/a-renowned-french-media-artist-takes-on-wall-street\/"},"modified":"2017-03-14T17:21:40","modified_gmt":"2017-03-14T09:21:40","slug":"a-renowned-french-media-artist-takes-on-wall-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benayoun.com\/zh-hans\/2012\/03\/13\/a-renowned-french-media-artist-takes-on-wall-street\/","title":{"rendered":"Huffington Post article by Michael Kurcfeld"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cOccupy Wall Screen\u201d: A Renowned French Media Artist Takes On Wall Street (VIDEO)<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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first published on Huffington Post http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/michael-kurcfeld\/wall-street-art_b_1239101.html\\<\/a><\/div>\n
By Michael Kurcfeld<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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French media artist Maurice Benayoun is way ahead of today\u2019s economists. He long ago figured out that collective emotions trackable on the Web might be used to predict market ups and downs. Recent books like Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy<\/em> echo the notion that the market has become a histrionic arena that begs for regulatory controls, and there is at least one hedge fund that uses the analysis of mass tweets to make stock predictions. But Benayoun is no Wall Street gambler trying to game the system. He hopes his recent work will in fact aid and engage the Occupy Wall Street movement, which he says is still more potent in the U.S. than in Europe \u2014 though not for long.<\/p>\n

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Benayoun in front of Emotion Forecast<\/em><\/center>This week Benayoun arrives in Manhattan to unveil the latest in an ongoing multimedia series called \u201cThe Mechanics of Emotion\u201d \u2014 a 15-part opus which grew out of the idea that the Internet is the world\u2019s nervous system, and that messages sent between users crossed \u201czones of pain and pleasure\u201d near and far. Using various analytic and graphic tools in his ever-evolving tech arsenal, he set out to map the world\u2019s emotions. In one part, he created a series of \u201cfrozen feelings\u201d \u2014 machine-made sculptures of digitally carved disks in various materials. Each disk bore a topographic pattern that corresponded to real-time Web data which inventoried emotional states in the 3,200 biggest cities on the planet, by tracking word clusters (ecstatic, angry, terrified etc). These have been exhibited around the world (including Shanghai), presented first as religious relics and then as luxury items. Notes Benayoun, \u201cThe paintings and statuary of the Church ended up in the homes of collectors.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Emotion Vending Machine<\/em><\/center>He also built an \u201cemotion vending machine\u201d that dispenses \u201cmusical cocktails\u201d based on selected emotions, which offers a wry twist on art\u2019s ongoing critique of runaway consumerism. The project is really a result of Benayoun\u2019s desire to humanize subtler new technologies, albeit on a global scale that suggests a political dimension. He is asking questions about who inhabits the brain of this nervous system and who profits from it. How dependable and unmediated by special interests is the information it gives us? \u201cBeyond technology isn\u2019t it people trying to have a better life?\u201d He also sees \u201cThe Mechanics of Emotion\u201d as a metaphor of the art world, and how it transforms human values and vagaries into investment commodities.<\/p>\n

\"2012-01-28-occupywallscreen.jpg\"…………\"2012-01-28-JPMorgan.jpg\"<\/center>In the series\u2019 latest incarnations, Occupy Wall Screen<\/em> and Emotion Forecast <\/em>juxtapose stock-valuation readouts of selected financial institutions (deemed responsible for recent economic crises) with the collective emotions of places that have held OWS-type events. Beginning January 31, it will appear writ large on the Big Screen Plaza outdoor screen in mid-town Manhattan, across from the Eventi Hotel. Using an iconography that mixes stock-market numerology with TV news, Benayoun seeks to contrast the avarice of the 1% with the humanity of the 99%. He also has some radical ideas about Wall Street machinations, advocating, for instance, for regulation that would impose a one-day delay on all trades \u2014 to mitigate the emotionalism that the instant-trade market has ratcheted up to damaging levels.<\/p>\n

Although Benayoun is a Parisian born in Algeria, it\u2019s more to the point to say he\u2019s a pioneering international media artist. Having mined the digital-into-art realm since well before most others, he is revered in his field and spends much of his time exhibiting and lecturing abroad. \u201cDefining myself is always a difficult question because I\u2019ve changed my title many times. Multimedia explorer, artiste plasticien<\/em>, conceptual artist… and now I just say Open Media artist \u2014 the result of the evolution of the media the artist can use. We don\u2019t have to use just painting and sculpture anymore; we can use video, film, Internet, virtual reality, augmented reality, installations and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Benayoun is probably France\u2019s most cutting-edge artist, in that he is usually absorbed with whatever new visual technology is emerging in ways accessible to artists, beginning with 3D animation in the early 1990s. But he doesn\u2019t just tinker with these new toys to show off their cool tech-fair features; he seeks ways to make them enlighten us about society, perception, human behavior and other weighty matters he likes to ponder. He\u2019s a thinker first, and technology is just a means to a dialectic end that asks more questions than it answers. He likes to connect, as he says, philosophy, poetry, politics and art… perhaps a very European tendency, melding disparate layers in the way the continent\u2019s oldest cities do.<\/p>\n

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World Skin: A Photo Safari In The Land of War<\/em> (1998)<\/center>Benayoun naturally thinks in \u201cworld scale\u201d as he calls it, and navigational tools are an essential component of his works… to go beyond image to experiencing a world that is trying to be meaningful. The last time he hit New York was with one of his many interactive installations \u2014 called World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War<\/em>. Typically immersive and elaborate, it involved lending cameras to visitors for the purpose of \u201cerasing memories by taking photos of photos\u201d of WWII and the Bosnian War, as they made their way through a harrowing 3D environment.<\/p>\n

Benayoun is a prolific artist and his works are too numerous and layered to describe here with any thoroughness, but a few ought to be mentioned. As an indication of his stature in France, he was invited to create a permanent on-site installation for the 200th anniversary of the Arc de Triomphe. He took the opportunity to make a rather subversive point about the obsolete imperial gesture of war monuments. Another signature piece was Tunnel Under The Atlantic<\/em>, a symbolic but working link between museums in Paris and Montreal. He employed \u201ctele-virtuality\u201d and artificial intelligence to achieve a dialogue between users 3500 miles apart. It was later re-cycled to create Paris-Delhi.<\/p>\n

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Cosmopolis<\/em> (2005)<\/center>In Cosmopolis<\/em>, a complex meditation on urbanism which travelled to four cities in China, viewers entered a large dynamic 360\u02da panorama comprised of scenes from a dozen major Asian and Western cities. As one peered through observation binoculars, their views were captured and added to a hypothetical new city that was slowly, cumulatively built from bits of existing ones. \u201cThe City of Tomorrow must be the fruit of intersecting gazes and experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"2012-01-28-The_Dump.jpg\"<\/center>Some artists hoard their ideas, thinking them a rare and precious fuel. But Benayoun, who loves nothing more than to argue concepts over a bottle of fine wine, has more ideas than he can possibly execute. So he engages in what he calls transactional creation, whereby people freely exchange ideas and images that cross-pollinate and result in works that are in effect time-release collaborations. He founded \u201cThe Dump,\u201d a bilingual Web repository for conceptual-art projects that remain open for anyone\u2019s use. As a tongue-in-cheek act of academic satire, Benayoun made this his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. \u201cI was getting a degree for a blog about things I\u2019d never done.\u201d This led to a forum in Poland filled with artists who had actually realized some of those ideas, or at least been inspired by them. It was another example of Benayoun deploying the new information networks in ways that stretched or demolished the domains that artists had been used to fitting into.<\/p>\n

Below is a glimpse of how Maurice Benayoun thinks aloud.<\/p>\n