Biennale Chroniques 2024 Explores Digital Imaginaries Across Provence

The 2024 edition of Biennale Chroniques, a digital imaginaries biennial, unfolds across Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, and Avignon until January 19, 2025. Many works engage with digital themes, from surveillance to influencers and robots. At Marseille's Friche la Belle de Mai, Studio Smack presents Speculum, a video installation reinterpreting Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1505) with animation but without social interaction. Donatien Aubert's video installation L'Héritage de Bentham at the Tour de la Friche examines Jeremy Bentham's 18th-century panopticon prison architecture and contemporary surveillance. In Aix-en-Provence, over a dozen venues host exhibitions, including Like moi at Espace culturel départemental 21, bis Mirabeau, featuring Ethel Lilienfeld's mixed-media video installation EMI about a virtual influencer. At the 3 bis f contemporary art center, June Balthazard & Pierre Pauze present Demain si le jour se lève, blending documentary and fiction aesthetics with sculptural practices. Avignon's Grenier à sel exhibition Le Futur est déjà là includes Varvara & Mar's 2017 robotic arm installation Humans Need not to Count, questioning human redundancy. Stelarc's 1980 robotic Third Hand is also displayed, highlighting debates shifting from body to mind with generative AI. The biennial launched with a professional gathering at Friche la Belle de Mai.