Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion's 'Collapsing New People' at La Chaufferie

At La Chaufferie, the art center affiliated with the Haute École des arts du Rhin in Strasbourg, the duo Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion present the exhibition 'Collapsing New People' from October 4 to November 10, 2019. The space, with its church-like architecture, hosts two alternating films that blend sacrificial and unifying themes. The first film, 'B0mb' (2018), is based on Gregory Corso's 1958 jazz poem, a love letter to the nuclear bomb, and uses an algorithm to endlessly generate images from the web, creating a continuously evolving commentary on internet visual culture. The second film, 'Lighting Ride' (2017), compiles amateur videos of 'Taser Certifications'—a required process for American civilians to own a Taser—showing faces contorted in pain, slowed down and filtered with Photoshop's 'oil painting' effect to evoke Renaissance paintings. The exhibition also includes 'Sssuuunnn', LED bars programmed to simulate sunrise and sunset, and 'Fireplace', an installation of various screens (iPads, TVs, computers) playing fireplace videos from Netflix and live streams, questioning the substitution of reality with representation.