I post, therefore I am.
"Absorbed by light" is a sculpture imagined by artist Gali May Lucas which was presented last year at the Amsterdam Light Festival. A grim truth about our time, which shows under (actual) crude spotlights, what we all experience and/or see daily, in the street, the subway, at a coffee terrace or during a night out with friends. All is said there, our addiction to digital extended parts, isolation into delusional bubbles, without any direct connections with our fellow humans. We are mesmerized by our numerical avatars' lives, in a narcissistic vertigo, but it isn't Narcisse merely looking and admiring his reflection anymore, but his self-absorbed alter-ego, desperately waiting for positive feedback, in the form of "likes", "views", "hearts" and other nonsense reactions. No more real interactions, no more frank and honest discussions with our peers, but a dreadful and disgusting "two-headed ego". Social media has become acme, the modern product making up for our social, sentimental, relational, sensual, intellectual deficiencies, imposing themselves as the new ontological proof of the existence of "I" in the world, a pathetic reboot of the "cogito ergo sum" into an "I post, therefore I am" that is often nothing but vanity.
Those ice-cold, petrified, virgin-white statues are in fact an allegory of the cowardly "communication" means which seems to have been adopted by humanity today... An odd paradox, that, while our planet is dangerously heating up, our world is cooling down, often forgetting the simple empathy.
What if, to sail up the river, we unplugged for a minute to go back to real life and exchange? Very humbly, matériO wishes to play its role in this hygienic act and invites you to its now legendary Saint-Nicholas gingerbread party, which will of course take place on the 6th of November (more information below). Come and visit its real showroom, have a conversation with the real people in it, (re)discover real materials, touch some really intriguing, real samples, and even enjoy a real homemade gingerbread, a real feast of the senses, and, even better, the ultimate snobism, in one of the rare "white zones" in Paris, some sort of a spatio-temporal ridge in which electromagnetic waves barely enter. What else could you ever ask for?
Quentin (cranky guy)
