Who Is Who In This Story?

Antoine Geiger is a 20 year-old French photographer who has had four exhibitions in France during the last two years and whose work has been widely published in international publications.

About his insightful yet rather disturbing creative work presented here, he says:

This work is called ‘sur-fake’ in reference to a previous project called ‘sur-face’. It [places] the screen as an object of ‘mass subculture,’ alienating the relation to our own body, and more generally to the physical world.

I wanted to come back to the idea of these faked identities, over-exposed, sucked by the digital gulf that breaks the relation to ‘real’, to bring back a self-focused image of the individual. What interests me in this texture of sucked faces, is that the overexposure gradually allows a very organic dimension, as well as digital, to render something quite disturbing. Some pictures are in a square format, reusing the standards of Instagram.

The screen has become a genuine, daily, biological extension

Through technology, humanity has moved away from the animal to get closer to plants. Except that man is a moving plant. We have rooted ourselves in our modernity, depending more and more on external sources of energy; we are linked, connected to all sides. With globalization we end up looking for our roots. We plug in our mobile phone and here we are, grafted to our pebbles. Despite the sedentary, Western lifestyles, a dream of unbridled nomadism remains.

The escape

So we escape. Even better, we project ourselves. It’s like in the movies, and yet it’s talking about you. We press a button, the screen turns on, and it is as if the whole physical world puts itself on stand-by. The show can start. In the end we only escape from ourselves. Then we become curators of our own lives. Inducing that it has any interest at all, we find refuge in a certain number of behaviours, one more curious than the other.

The screen works like a fag, a Ventolin refill or a fresh bottle of water. It is about the reflex, the underlying, the standard. It soothes the conscience, stimulates it, orders it, satisfies it. Your arm isn’t long enough for your ego – no problem, selfie stick is here! And this is how identities move and in a sum of generic translations of a common feeling. An alloy sheep/sunflower that doesn’t bother anyone. The screen, more and more thin, more and more invisible and yet closer and closer to the mirror of so many fragile existences that, while thinking they are opening to the world, are actually making it pass through a tainted funnel like an Instagram filter.

Welcome to the mass sub-culture

The small anodyne object that purrs in your bag when you receive a call, that cries when it’s power is low, which place does it have in your mind? The ‘sur-face’, sleek, reassuring, becomes ‘sur-fake’. This polymorphous interface transforms itself into a dialogue between your neurosis and your psychosis. Who is who in this story? The screen probably incarnates a part of our lives, and how talented it is; it is soon more real than our own body, our ‘incarnation’.

So. Strange plant this man that substitutes itself in a curious ping-pong match with pixels that panic like a swarm of gnats.

antoinegeiger.com