Epiphanies

Installation View
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video narrative keyword climate
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06:15

Video Narrative Keyword Body
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06:21

Video Narrative Keyword Financial Market
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06:14

Video Narrative Keyword Surveillance
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06:30

bruno epi
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My first net.art piece, Epiphanies is a conceptual Google Hack inspired by James Joyce’s definition of the epiphany. It is considered as one of the very first pieces of “Google Art”, probably the first…

In 2001, Google wasn’t yet the Internet icon it has become and I was sure that my piece would disappear very soon since it lives on Google and feeds itself from Google’s database like a vampire. Hence this piece was supposed to have a doubly ephemeral aspect: first because each epiphany was by essence an ephemeral manifestation, and second because the piece itself would probably vanish as its provider of raw material would go to bankruptcy…

I was naïve of course, and the piece turned out to be very robust since Google practically became a new “protocol” of the Web (and more specifically of the Web 2.0). Ironically it is the monopolistic turn of capitalism at the age of globalization and its tendancy towards the uniformization of thought, that allowed my piece to survive, a piece that was originally conceived in a spirit of denunciation of these trends.

Exhibitions:
2006: Galerie Sollertis
2004: En Parallèle, Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris
2004: Third Nuit Blanche of Paris
2002: Freebiennial.org