TAFAA - FERTILITY DEVICE (NUDGE FOR THE SCAPEGOAT)
TAFAA - FERTILITY DEVICE (NUDGE FOR THE SCAPEGOAT) is a sculpture that draws on various elements and materials that recur in Chloé Delarue’s work to bring about new speculative scenarios. In front of an inactive screen, we are faced with our own reflection. Behind it is a cast of a head borrowed from a revolving statue of a ram. Below, a blue halo emanates from an LCD panel, revealing fake advertisements, all of which are exaggerated caricatures of the cybernation of bodies and desires. Nearby, a washbasin adorned with a pewter squid serves as an ashtray, the meticulously arranged latex cigarettes form a strange example of the Japanese sampuru. Finally, two neon lights, halfway between antennae and an abstract logo, signal their presence from afar. In this FERTILITY DEVICE, the subtitle Nudge for the scapegoat evokes the complex relationship between desire and rivalry in simulated worlds such as social networks, content platforms, and online video games. Each element, often appropriated and turned into an ornament, questions our capacity to act, our agency in the face of our loss of independence due to the new forms of automation that are progressively regulating our lives. The scapegoat changes skin all the time, and our emotions, which have become calculable, feed into all sorts of predictive operators, reformulating our relationship with others, with a new otherness. This work is a seductive concentration of the turbulence we experience as it infiltrates our perceptions. TAFAA - FERTILITY DEVICE (NUDGE FOR THE SCAPEGOAT) is part of FERTILITY DEVICE, a group of sculptures exploring autonomous aesthetic generativity. Inspired by the cold, standardised devices of industrial design, these works are an allegory of the autonomous “fertility” induced by generative models. Each iteration of this series of works takes up these questions in a singular way, observing the effects they have on our capacities for representation.
Exhibitions
Hek, Bâle (Suisse)
from 12 Feb to 24 May 2022
BINZ 39, Zurich (Suisse)
from 20 May to 19 Jun 2021