THIRD DEVIATION

Edouard Cabay's research focuses on issues related to digital culture and manufacturing processes - crossing the fields of the immaterial and the physical through an incessant intermingling of these two fields, to produce strange constructions "concretely concrete" although governed by the abstract laws of computational computing, the purpose of which is, however, to shape realizations that are part of the Euclidean space-time of our materialist contemporaneity (...) etc. We could continue this way indefinitely, echoing the work of Edouard Cabay, an endless language that oscillates between cognitive reflection and object description. Like the mythological narratives summoning monsters, chimeras and other machine-men, the projects developed by Edouard Cabay question our certainties as rational human beings, shaking the stable edifice of hard sciences.

THIRD DEVIATION is part of a series of experiments whose object of study covers opposing ideas of stability and instability. The series of DEVIATION introduces wisely notions of accidents, counter time operationality and random interventions in the infallible process of a technological mastery, then dragging production towards unexpected plasticities.

The work presented by the CIVA at KANAL-Centre Pompidou is a catapult (length of the lever arm: 60cm) that moves on a rail (length: 14m) parallel to the glass facade of the showroom on Place Sainctelette. The catapult is programmed to launch 2,000 paintballs at the end of the 10-day performance, gradually revealing a drawing (width: 12m / height: 2m) whose geometric rules have been previously encoded in the robotic circuits that control the mechanical arm. The drawing materializes itself directly on the glass facade, producing from then a pictorial canvas consisting of a recto and a verso, where the reading of the paintings’ layers is inversely possible according to whether one is inside or outside the building.

The work brings together in its skin thickness two public spaces that face each other: the sidewalk and the museum in the making.