Rien a Cacher / Rien a Craindre
Paris , 2011
As the first artists in residence at La Gaîté Lyrique, United Visual Artists created Rien a Cacher / Rien a Craindre, a series of responsive light and sound installations.
Exploring the potential dualities of technology, the exhibition simultaneously celebrates and critiques the brave new world of the digital. Inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth century design for the Panopticon, a utopian prison, collectively the installations create the impression of La Gaîté as an all-knowing, all-seeing building. The experience that starts seductively, with the gentle sensory pleasures of the early installations such as Assembly but gradually contains increasingly sinister overtones as it builds towards the disorientating and unsettling finale, Room 101.
Visitors participate and interact with the installations as they wander through the building’s various spaces, observing and being watched adding to the feeling that the building is alive while a sense of unease and self-awareness grows. The installations are connected to each other by an ambient, generative light-scape and sound specially created by Henrik Ekeus and Matthias Kispertand which is set up in a cyclical rhythm, reinforcing the personality of the building.
In la chambre Sonore UVA and British artist Scanner collaborated to create Les Fenêtres using extracts from Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, sliced and choreographed into a spiralling pattern of words. A generative light system responds in real time to the sound, building to a synaesthetic peak.
Rien a Cacher / Rien a Craindre reminds visitors that digital technology may not lead us towards utopia and that ultimately its fundamental problem is that at some point, it all breaks down, and then “all we have left is each other”. Over 14.000 people visited the exhibition over six days from 1st to 6th March 2011.
