Pascal Dombis's monograph spans 25 years of digital creations exploring the excess, repetition and unpredictability of technological processes. The publication includes a large iconography (200 images), an interview with the artist, two specially-commissioned essays and a collection of articles from 2002-2015 reviewing Dombis's constant evolution.
“I would say that my artwork explores our relation to Time. The time of digital machines, regulated by their pure presence and their imme-diacy, is transforming our future, but also our past. To me, the real issue at stake is not the unlikely replacement of men by machines but more concretely, the fact that the time of digital machines is superseding ours. It is my contention that the role of today's artists is to consider such upheavals. After all, Time is a form of space. Burroughs used to say 'Image is Time'; and it must be said that Man did create images before inventing writing, and that the numberless images of our contemporary world preceded the characters used to communicate with computers. It is up to living artists like me to hack the time lines imposed by digital systems, bots and other forms of Artificial Intelligence! Questioning the world we live in, whatever its potentials or hazards, is definitely much more fun if we use the tools that it has designed itself.”
Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Artistes & Robots,” Grand Palais, Paris, from April 5 to July 9, 2018.
Pascal Dombis (born 1965 in Metz, lives and works in Paris) is a visual artist who works with excessive technological processes. Producing excessive repetitions of simple processes which create unpredictable, unstable and dynamic visual environments, he explores such fields as language, noise, control, irrationality and our contemporary digital-driven societies.
