PHOTOS © FARAH KHELIL

Portraits OF DIGITAL PLAYERS

FARAH KHELIL (TUNISIA)

http://farahkhelil.free.fr Farah Khelil excavates and exploits data from websites, archives, illustration captions and various media; she uses these elements to invent reading devices that experiment with their esthetic and poetic forms through technical translation.

PHOTO © D.R.

These reading and translation devices serve a body of work that she calls software. They allow us to apprehend the world through automatically processed information, without transformation or illustration. As she collects data, she attempts to show reality as it presents itself to her, with its share of invisibility. She bears witness to these scenes of reality, which she names, arranges, narrates and records in order to see them differently, poetically.

Technique mixte II. Farah Khelil. Generative installation, variable dimensions and content (2010-2012). Made with Pure Data during the training course Pure Data & its multimedia librairies, Centre de Ressources Art Sensitif (CRAS), 2010, Mains d’Œuvres, Paris.

I’m intrigued by our way of seeing things around us through media, she says. These modes of seeing and hearing, especially through television and the Internet, transform the things captured by the lens and transferred by their flow, into double images, into illusions. To me, this world of circulating images is an unprecendented source of contemplation and creation. I borrow this translation function of media while emphasizing what it produces in terms of clichés, captions and viewpoints, as if to say that reality does not exist outside of the image that we make of it. Farah Khelil was born in 1980 in Carthage. She earned her Master degree in Art Science and Techniques at the Fine Arts Institute of Tunis (ISBAT) in 2007. She lives in Paris, doing her Ph.D thesis in Art and Art Sciences, and has been teaching visual arts at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne since 2010.

Point de vue, point d'écoute (Lectures). Farah Khelil. Objets-Son exhibition, Palais Abdellia, Tunis, 2012.

Moreover, Farah has contributed to the collective publication Pure Data, Tisser le son et l’image (Floss Manuals, Mains d’Œuvres) and discovered the wide range of collaborative practices online. She perceives the richness of digital and electronic media, a practice of technology and language that opens up a field of possibilities for the visual arts. She believes that there are no “digital artists” but rather artists who modulate various techniques in order to offer a panoply of viewpoints on being in the world and living together. Q >

POINT DE VUE, POINT D'ÉCOUTE (LECTURES)

For the Objets-Son exhibition at E-FEST(1) in Tunisia in 2012, Farah presented an interactive sound installation, made up of a music box, a musical score card and two texts. The installation is a braille translation, perforated on the music box score, of the lyrics of a popular Tunisian song (Maouédna Ardhak ya baladna, written by Amina Fakhet, music by Milhem Barakat). The generated musical notes constitute a reappropriated melody derived from the original. Three modes of interpretation are at play: the lyrics (printed on the wall), elements of a collective memory that instantly evoke the well-known melody; the interpretation of the score, which provokes a shift between the song and the sound generated by the music box; and finally, a quote by Gilbert Simon-

don(2), which introduces an esthetic angle, creating a dichotomy between the scholarly and the popular.

TECHNIQUE MIXTE II

This generative piece, presented in the 2012 exhibition Shuffling Cards, Mouvement aléatoire des cartes (art-cade*, gallery of Les Grands bains douches de la Plaine, Marseille), began in 2009 with a list of artwork captions collected from art books and catalogues at the Centre Pompidou library in Paris. Once detached from their subject, the captions generate the viewer’s personal imaginary museum. The artist wrote a program (with Pure Data) that converts text into image: by reading the list of captions, it translates this textual data into dynamic graphics. Bubbles that attract and collide as if by gravitational force reference the media bubbles that surround contemporary artworks. On a model of quantum particles, the circulation of caption bubbles is the result of their cohabitation on the list. Finally, their diameter varies according to the number of occurrences in the source text. (1) See page dedicated to E-FEST in this issue. (2) This type of beauty is just as abstract as that of a geometric construction, and the function of the object must be understood in order for its structure, and the relationship between this structure and the world, to be properly imagined and esthetically felt. (Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, Éditions Aubier).

Technique mixte II. Farah Khelil. Generative installation, variable dimensions and content (2010-2012). Talmart Gallery, Paris, 2012.

74 - mcd 71 - ARTISTS, INSTIGATORS OF INNOVATIVE PROJECTS, EVENTS, INSTITUTIONS…