MARC DENTAND

Noxias herbas (2019-2022)

The artist sees a convergence between the hippie dream and neo-liberalism, both from the 60s to 70s. Enabled by communication technology and increasingly akin to the Matrix, they shaped our present world and inspired these works. During a residency in Naples, he was impressed by the mastery of porcelain artisans making thousands of tiny decorative flowers. He chose for his theme to cast with them thousands of white and black daisies in Capodimonte porcelain. And like any social phenomenon, the daisies, in the course of an iterative creative process – through moulding, unmoulding and remoulding for different purposes – lost their original form. They were incorporated into new masses and eventually disappeared, and the works contain no more porcelain and hardly flower shape. Some have been wetted by the water that passes under the bridges and brings daily happiness. Others have been stained by the suffering or the wars that distorted social communications cause or support. These processes, actually and metaphorically, have been enormously accelerated using soulless algorithms which observe us and constantly produce new realities.

The body of work has different levels of abstraction

Installation project/concept: huge vertical field of loose flower shapes disappearing into a rain of interactive binary code.

Unintended consequences

The Flower Power wanted to eliminate patriarchy and war to empower people and create a better world. It permeates the discourse of Western internet technologists. Finally, citizens could come together across borders and be heard directly through social media, free from intermediaries and manipulations by established powers. E-mail, social networks, and the internet did bring humans together and made knowledge available worldwide, unleashing great waves of developments that improved many lives and spread around the world. WikiLeaks and the NSA leaks by E. Snowden gave a sense that decency could be imposed on governments in their ruling methods.

But the capitalist logic embraced to develop these technologies from the beginning would soon lead to noxious effects. The first visible one was the build-up and use of big data and the total loss of privacy control. Then the undermining of society and democracy started showing in 2016 with Brexit and the 2016 US elections are devastating. Further, the attention economy is creating addictions, mass stalking and other negative effects on individuals.

Without thinking about it, without realizing it, the toxic cocktail has pitted groups against each other, manipulated them, concentrated uncontrolled power in the hands of unelected engineers, endangering democracy and human sanity. The flower-themed series is a metaphor for the unintentional transformation of a pretty porcelain daisy.