Zaven Paré's Cybernetic Forest at Galerie Charlot

Artist and researcher Zaven Paré presents a solo exhibition at Galerie Charlot in Paris from October 20 to November 17, 2012. The show functions as a global installation surveying a decade of his work, where each piece retains autonomy. Paré's machines blur the line between puppet, automaton, and robot, appearing as prototypes of prototypes—unfinished projects where process matters over completion. His interest in the boundary between machine and human leads him to explore robot anthropomorphism, including experiments with a million-dollar robot animated by fifty motors expressing impatience. This connects to Masahiro Mori's 1970 Uncanny Valley theory, which describes the thin line between empathy and disgust when artificial creatures closely resemble humans. Paré cites influences from Nicolas Schöffer's mechanical trees and Jean Tinguely's kinetic sculptures, describing his retrospective path as traversing a cybernetic forest. He also references Bruno Latour's concept of technique as a difference rather than an object, a new exploration of otherness. The exhibition text is by Raphael Cuir.