ABOUT KMH

C. B.: Why did you choose the form of a screensaver?

D. V.: When Guy Tosatto, the curator, invited me to present an electronic work on the Musée de Grenoble website, I wanted, as in my recent installations, to explore a different relationship between my work and its audience. Strictly speaking, KM/H is neither an online artwork, since the web serves only as a means of acquiring it, nor really a screensaver, since it does not fulfil a screensaver’s primary function.

By inviting people to download and install KM/H on a computer, I offer them both the possibility of making a work their own and, in a sense, of participating in a larger work, constituted by the dispersal and cloning of KM/H across anonymous computers. The idea is to set a process of proliferation in motion while preserving an intimate relationship between the audience and the work.

C. B.: Another kind of relationship with the work?

D. V.: Yes. KM/H also has a different economic status. It is freely available.

The only currency of exchange is time: the time spent downloading it, and the time people are willing to set aside from their computer use to give KM/H its own space for expression.

C. B.: So making the work one’s own is bound up with time?

D. V.: Downloading and installing KM/H on your computer, and coming to appreciate how it works, requires you to give something of your time…

Once installed, KM/H appears of its own accord after a given interval, but any action on the computer makes it disappear immediately. It emerges when you are no longer attending to your computer, like an invitation to a moment set apart, a moment of idleness…

For me, that is where interactivity lies.

C. B.: An interactivity that slips in uninvited, only to disappear when one acts?

D. V.: It is not interactivity in the usual sense. You cannot act upon the piece as I have allowed people to do in other projects. If you act, you lose contact with it.

C. B.: So it is also, perhaps paradoxically, a relationship founded on disappearance?

D. V.: Exactly. It is a kind of hide-and-seek.

There is also the idea of death, since KM/H runs in step with the computer’s clock and disappears after a year.

C. B.: This movement at work within the piece is also present in the images.

D. V.: The images bear witness to movement, to a journey. They were made from tracking shots filmed from a car.

I often listen to the radio while driving. One morning, on the motorway between Grenoble and Valence, I came across a programme in which Gilles Deleuze was discussing the “movement-image”. I think that, for a brief moment, what I heard and what I saw coincided perfectly. I kept that somewhere in the back of my mind. For KM/H, I filmed that journey between Grenoble and Valence again.

C. B.: The images have undergone a particular treatment.

D. V.: They are video images reworked at low resolution. The pixels are clearly visible; the treatment is almost painterly, impressionistic. There is a deliberate movement towards abstraction. I wanted to recover the substance of the image, free of any descriptive intent.

Their abstract quality comes not only from pixelation, but also from movement and the focal lengths used. From time to time, signs appear—elements that help place the other images back within a context—but there is always this sense of fragmentation, of appearance and disappearance.

C. B.: At the same time, the images themselves are set in motion by the generative programme.

D. V.: For KM/H, I retained fragments of the filmed journey—one minute in all. Around sixty one-second loops combine across four screens.

These samples have two particular qualities:

• They can be combined, with entry and exit points that allow every element to connect with every other.

• Their appearance has no fixed duration: they loop back on themselves, generating new random combinations every second, every minute, every hour and every day.

Like a set of phonemes, they allow an abstract visual and sonic language to be constructed, one that remains capable of entering into a dialogue with the real.

The compositional and generative work also extended to sound. Here, the challenge was to create something that would work both rhythmically and harmonically. I began by composing a musical sequence, which I then dismantled into samples that could be recombined.

C. B.: We hear fragments of speech, sometimes whole sentences.

D. V.: I incorporated spoken samples taken from radio and cinema. The idea was to prompt reflection, to bring fragments of speech into conversation.

Through them, I wanted to introduce into the work the very questions underlying my practice. We hear Godard and Deleuze, for example, and encounter references to cinema, the image, movement, time…

C. B.: To question our relationship with time?

D. V.: The temporal experience of a sonic or visual work is generally defined by a duration. We know the “format” of a video or a musical piece, and the editing is conceived to “inhabit” that span of time as fully as possible.

With KM/H, the task is to work with units of duration rather than with a duration as a whole. What I call visual and sonic samples become the units of a montage whose length and sequence remain undetermined.

I wanted to make something without a fixed duration, something that would establish another relationship with time, without beginning or end. It is one of my current preoccupations: what would a film or video work be if it had no set duration, if it grew from its centre rather than from its endpoints, generating a life of its own?

C. B.: While the image is distanced from reality, speech does not seem to be entirely so. Fragments of meaning remain perceptible.

D. V.: The programming could have fragmented the sentences to the point of unintelligibility, but in this piece I wanted speech to convey meaning.

I therefore tried to tune the system to a threshold: it never quite becomes nonsense or a cacophony of voices. Meaning also takes shape through chance and in fragments, in the meeting and dialogue between words and images.

C. B.: Is this also a dialogue with the viewer?

D. V.: The treatment of sound and image means that the piece does not reveal itself immediately. I think there are several levels: depending on the attention you give it, you will read it differently.

There is an element of intimacy. It is a little like meeting someone. Having KM/H on your computer allows you, I think, to experience a different relationship with the work, through a dialogue and a span of time unlike those of the exhibition space.

C. B.: But the generative process also brings about another kind of relationship with a work that is no longer immutable?

D. V.: KM/H changes each time it appears, then continues to evolve to the rhythm of a clock, every second, every minute, every hour and every day. The changes are not radical; they occur through gradual shifts.

C. B.: This implies a particular understanding of construction and structure.

D. V.: I tried to work with a living construction, neither fixed nor fully defined. Generative systems allow elements to be placed alongside one another in an undetermined, evolving sequence. They produce an unstable, changing organisation and, in that sense, approach the living and the organic.

C. B.: This living reality seems connected to your relationship with places, which are often less identifiable, mapped locations than spaces that are lived and reconstructed in and through experience.

D. V.: For me, attempting to convey the bodily experience of moving through a place calls upon something abstract, more than upon a simulation, illustration or imitation of reality.

When Virilio asks, “Where are we when we travel?”, he suggests a territory particular to each of us: a body of multiple dimensions that becomes the shifting interface between an inside and an outside.

We do not simply inhabit a place; we are also inhabited by it. Often, it is by “becoming” a place, a territory, a journey or a movement that we come into contact with landscape.

There is also the idea of drifting. As soon as I move, or am carried, through space, my thoughts work differently, as though being in motion gave them a new mobility within a new territory.

We cannot therefore say that there is no cartography. There is a cartography that seeks to make a new body its own, to traverse it and trace its contours by drawing upon another geography.

Before it is a physical space, a place is a construction of the mind: a shifting, changing plane that ceaselessly stirs the senses, a multisensory diagram made of affects and percepts, sensations, memories and shifting points of reference, all interconnected.

C. B.: To attend to the composite, to connections and relationships?

D. V.: “Only in the intervals have I found the surface of who I am.”

It is a phrase by the architect Henry Gaudin in which I recognise myself completely. What shapes me is what lies between things, rather than the things themselves.

I do not approach the multiplicity of forms of expression as a collection or a scheme, but as a search for the shifting boundaries they bring into being: that threshold where things actually begin to exist.

C. B.: But how do you establish these connections between things?

D. V.: By exploring several forms of expression, I investigate empirically how things take shape, evolve and organise themselves…

I am always searching for a language, a flow of writing in which ideas, images and sounds matter less to me than the physical and mental spaces they create and leave open between them.

C. B.: So it is less a question of media, or of using one or several media, than of composing relationships between different elements?

D. V.: But that is precisely what multimedia means to me. It is neither a reduction to a particular medium nor a multiplication of media considered independently of one another.

It is the search for a language written in boundaries and shifts of meaning, one that might convey the unfolding of an open process of thought and creation.

What interests me is to leave the choice open, to remain a critical explorer or a nomad in search of a foreign language, of something that eludes established codes.

C. B.: This transdisciplinary, rather than multidisciplinary, understanding also informs your approach to computing.

D. V.: I began using computers in my work when I finished my studies in 1986. I learned to use various software packages for imaging, video, sound and architecture, as well as for online and offline interactivity. Yet beyond the computer’s role as a medium of communication, or as a tool for storing, distributing and producing images and sound, the affinities between art and computing find their fullest meaning for me in the possibility of creating generative, evolving processes.

Beneath its cold exterior, computing evokes for me a poetics of the living, insofar as it offers the artwork a unique dimension: the capacity to generate a life of its own, autonomously or in response to an audience.

What fascinates me about computing as a medium is its capacity to embody a concept. But programming—asking a machine to carry out a particular task—requires specific languages, and I quickly realised that one cannot acquire overnight the knowledge of someone with ten years of programming experience.

For KM/H, I therefore chose to collaborate with Gregory Lasserre, a young programmer. He translated my concepts into computer language. For me, this exchange is part of a broader desire to collaborate with the scientific community.

C. B.: Such collaborations are often misunderstood, or regarded simply as the delegation of technical work.

D. V.: Unlike cinema, which always provides credits at the end of a film, contemporary art has often struggled to acknowledge the exchange inherent in any collaboration, even a technical one.

For me, it is this complementarity that allows us to reach another level of conception.