Working on the Internet is also manual work

Talking about your work is sometimes also doing it

If not to realise it in its entirety, it is at least to make it move forward, to push it like a stone is rolled. I use the Internet in this sense; as a new way of diversifying the discourse, of giving the least linear overview possible of my approach to the scene, which I experience as a space that does not follow a continuous temporal line.

For me, the only way to make a performance a reality, whatever its style, is to express this perpetual zigzagging, this back and forth, this procrastination between a goal that we plan to achieve and an equally palpable desire to give it up.

It is this space that I walk around on stage as well as behind this screen and whose trace I want to make visible, because for me it is in this in-between that the work of the performer who succeeds in something is realised.

Any other artistic accomplishment that wants to be definitively achieved and circumscribed appears to me as a heavy and patrimonial architecture. I prefer clay to these mirrors of human ego, fashioned in hard stone, which only ever dries to split or disintegrate on contact with humid air or a puddle of water and become a mirror of mud.

So I handle sites and performances like clay. I knead them as much as possible. Through this instability of the virtual material I try to favour the expression of a natural and autonomous movement. That of my thought. Not a reflexive thought, just a thought that runs, clings, unfolds, dissolves, incarnates to fade away.

The Web is a plastic material specific to the work of the visual artist

Painters and sculptors have wanted to capture nature, to grasp its essence. I don't have the impression that I want to do anything else by reproducing by mimicry the complex and hazardous intricacy of the flows of thoughts and images that run through me. Where most shows show a tree, I would like to see the movement of its sap and the evolution of the cells in its fibres rather than an overall image that tells me nothing about its underlying reality. The real is microscopic, invisible to the naked eye. I have no need of the didacticism of an artist who is often too pedagogical and not sufficiently poetic, to take pleasure in contemplating a landscape. My eyes and my reverie are enough for me.

The same goes for human stories, the charm of bodies and the attraction of beings that I am able to appreciate without the need for the crutch of an outside eye, in this case polluted through art. The works of the mind as they say, are often a step behind what is already known.

To go further, we need to work and question ourselves more. The notion of "life" itself is a rough perception of our daily lives. Only the living works. If it does not work, it simply does not exist. The concept of death itself cannot be reduced to a fixed event. With the last breath, the metamorphosis begins. Everything stirs and keeps stirring inside. Others experience what we no longer experience. It does not matter that they appear to us as microorganisms. The fact is that they are also us, even if they are not our consciousness.

Equally, the work I occasionally show on stage is only surface work.

The rest of the time, tirelessly, daily, without choosing to do so, I connect the small particles that make up my thought network. From an image to a text, from a site to another, I use the tools offered by WordPress to narrate something of this interweaving and in the best of cases, to give a faithful perception of it.

Unfortunately, WordPress remains a crude and relatively inappropriate tool for what I want to do. After many experiments, I decided to use it, as I don't have the time and the latitude to learn how to code perfectly. The trap would be to see my time and energy absorbed by it for a result that would be even more delayed. Faced with one's own shortcomings, limitations and imperfections, one must know how to make choices, or else one will keep putting off the development of what should ultimately be a tool.

So I found the solution by multiplying the sites in order to benefit from the diversity of forms that the themes designed for WordPress bring me. Faced with such a wide range of themes, it takes a lot of time and money to identify reliable themes that are properly coded and can be kept up to date by their authors. The same applies to plugins. If they make the charm of WordPress by their infinite variety, they are also paradoxically the most pathogenic for the health of the sites by their heaviness and their inordinate appetite in resources for the most badly conceived of them.

Without being a specialist, it is easy to see that the small world of WordPress has all the advantages and disadvantages of a liberal society. It's all over the place, and the entertaining and additional plugin options are all over the place, for better or for worse. But that's the way it is in this field. And if you choose to take an interest in the possibilities of creation on the Internet, you have to be prepared to give up any real independence.

Hanging over the heads of bloggers, the swords of Damocles are incredibly numerous. Possible suspensions or malfunctions of services by Internet service providers or hosts, interruptions of theme and plugin updates by their developers, infinite variety of screen resolutions and devices used by Internet users, multiplicity of computer systems, not to mention all the conflicts and incompatibilities that can exist between applications designed outside a real common standard and whose quality depends entirely on the goodwill of their designers.

In short, if the Internet can become more than just a simple platform for information or disinformation, but also the medium for a new narrative art that is close to staging, as I believe, it will also owe this to its many constraints, as is the case for all forms of artistic tools. It remains to be freed from them. And that, as far as I am concerned, is a large part of the adventure.

If we cannot be independent, let us try to be partly autonomous

This is what I try to do by having a lot of fun telling the same things through different interfaces.

For those who are interested, the charm of the different ways of presenting something is undeniable. These containers are just as important as the contents they display, if not more so. This is the art of staging: through what are things said? What contexts, what atmospheres, what vehicles, what aesthetics and how do these environments totally modify the meaning of what is said or shown? This is the very definition of what I consider the work of an actor, a performer or anyone who performs in public.

The circle is thus complete. The Internet is the virtual counterpart of the stage, which, if you think about it, has always proved to be just as impalpable in its essence, since it is entirely focused on the moment. The real and the virtual have never been so close and in many ways so similar.

Our era, logically, bears witness to this as much by its most astonishing technological aspects, signs of an impressive level of intellectual progress, as by the equally abysmal level of our mediocrity if we refer to the comments, many of them distressing, on social networks.

Further proof, if any were needed, of our quick and greedy taste for the appearance of things rather than for the reality of their depth. In my relative optimism, I am nevertheless convinced that everyone, thanks to the very particular sensitivity of our species, has access to the affordable luxury of self-reflection. We just need to give ourselves the simple means: a little time and a favourable context: a little solitude.