Outside our apartment a 54-day piece of performance art is happening. The light in the post office tower is flashing, it looks like a bad connection, but in fact it’s Cervantès ‘Don Quixote’ translated into Morse code! This 'work' by Jean-Baptiste Ganne is described thus:
Jean-Baptiste Ganne also cultivates a critical and sentimental link with politics. He defines his connection with art and the other with a poetic distance: "art, it’s a space between you and me, a smoke screen." It is within this in-between that he questions the representation of politics and the notions of otherness and singularity. In his installation El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, he had the famous novel by Cervantès translated into Morse. It was then retranscribed into light impulses by the light bulb in his studio during 54 days (the time for its entire reading by a computer). The work is thus perceived from the street. It works like an alarm signal both insignificant and worrying. A landmark in the city unveiling itself as a utopian and despaired enigmatic message sent to the community.
We are indeed talking about politics here, not in terms of commitment or politicized works, but in order to name artistic propositions symbolically consistent with this intermediate space, the birth place of the politics, as it is defined by Hannah Arendt: "[…] man is a-political, politics are born in the space-that-is-between-men, thus in something fundamentally exterior-to-man. Thus, there does not exist any truly political substance. Politics are born within the intermediate space and it does not constitute a connection.”
Since it appears that a purely mechanical act of transliteration can now become art, I have built ‘Omeros, The Bard Bot’. More profound that Ganne’s work Omeros reaches back to the well spring of western art and performs Homer’s Iliad in modern semaphore. Below are some views of Omeros and a short video of the opening of The Iliad in the English translation by Alexander Pope: ‘Achilles' wrath…’
Omeros and fan
Comments