burningcollection.tv

An online generative artwork originally commissioned for the virtual space of the Jeu de Paume in Paris and broadcasted alongside the exhibition "Le Supermarché des images" from February 13 to June 14, 2020.

For the DAZ festival in Zurich, the artists are reactivating the website for five days (28.10.-1.11.2020) and are showing the piece simultaneously online and as an immersive setup of eight video projections at the Museum für Gestaltung. The criteria used to automatically compile the artwork will be adapted to the Swiss media sphere with new unrevealed burning topics.

The artists have created a programme that selects in real time the five most-watched videos on a famous online content sharing platform. This selection is carried out according to a precise semantic field that the artists defined in advance.

The programme then takes these five sources, modifies them using random filters and aggregates them into a single video, which in the process becomes more complex and harder to decipher. The sound from each video is not modified and the five accumulated soundtracks provide some clues about the original subjects of the source videos. The artists have deliberately kept their selection criteria secret and will only reveal them at the end of the project.

Screenshots of this ever-changing chimerical video are saved at regular intervals, there by creating a collection of snapshots. By clicking on the "archive / images purchase" tab, you can consult these images collection, follow their progression and buy original prints of the images. Those will be printed on aluminum in 32 x 18 cm format and delivered to the visitor by post. When a piece is acquired, it is no longer available for purchase by other visitors.

An estimated 600,000 hours of video are uploaded to this famous platform every hour, an activity that consumes an increasingly significant amount of so-called “grey energy”. Perhaps this mass of videos viewed on a large scale represents the confused traces of our collective psyche that is constantly being bombarded with conflicting information and burned or dazzled by the image and sound zeitgeist. Perhaps these images provide an implicit definition of the different media environments that immerse and define us.

As a work of art, "burningcollection.tv" is apparently in contradiction with the crucial issues at stake and yet it evokes the complex processes that consume both our minds and the world’s energy resources.