An Aesthetic of Emptiness

I am a visual designer, and my digital work concerns my vision about the aesthetics of virtuality and the relationship between human and machine. One of my works, The Avatars (2001), addresses the schizophrenic part of us that we develop on the Web and the way that the personality changes in relation to this transparent image of ourselves, this life form existing only through the screen, an aesthetics of emptiness. These avatars are related to the machine world (the Web) by an electronic system and calculated in pixels, which, along with the shape of a square, form the basis of my prints. Each of the figures exists in its own world, representing an unreal station in a real world. This process gives rise to new forms of icons, inspired by primitive spiritual forms.

This relation with the machine has another aspect: bionic surgery, which I have presented like an haute couture accessory line. I believe that, in the near future, plastic surgery will be seen in this way, and people will develop fetishisms not only in relation to metal but also with regard to mechanical functions. We will become our own robots, and the machine will eventually become a priority in our daily functions. My proposition is to develop sympathy among body, mind and machine. If artificial hearts, for example, were made in the shape of valentines, I think that would avoid certain forms of rejection by recipients, because the heart would become an emotional object.

My work is a mix of high technology and the influence of such subcultures as that of comic books. Jack Kirby, for instance, was a groundbreaking influence for me in that the way in which he drew characters was so close to the vector method of constructing a shape. Designing with virtual tools also changes one's vision of an object. In 3D, any creation of a form begins with a cube, its edges, points in space. The computer does not include/understand intuitive forms.

Fig. 3.

Christophe Luxereau, The Hand, part of the series Electrum Corpus, 2001.

© Christophe Luxereau

My next exhibition, P = Mg FIAC (2003), showed how the mind develops its knowledge about texture, from noise on the screen to the texture of an algorithm—how our brain understands the noise on the screen, a texture that we can neither feel nor smell, but that everyone knows exists, even if it has no tangible existence.

Working with computers is a way for me to question myself about the posthuman design, a cross between the analogic and numeric, between mechanical and organic. With a machine, I can imagine human-mechanic extensions (Fig. 3). Our body has to mutate in order to adapt to the present world, just as art is mutating because contemporary needs are far from the 19th-century vision of art. Exploring new possibilities means fabricating and developing new tools.