person

1971 –

France

http://gregory.incident.net/

Using a range of analog and digital media, often in tandem, pioneering digital artist Gregory Chatonsky examines our relationship with technology. In 1994, he founded Incident, a creative platform, website and collective that includes members Vadim Bernard, Marika Dermineur, Reynald Drouhin, KRN, Claude Le Berre and Julie Morel. As a CD-Rom designer (Mémoires de la déportation, Möbius Award in multimedia), then web designer (Villa Médicis, Centre Pompidou, MacVal…), and most recently teacher, Chatonsky has multiplied his experiences, sources of inspiration and activities, as if to confuse his followers. As a pioneer of multimedia and Net Art, commuting between Paris and Montreal, Chatonsky continues to question our time by confronting public and private, real and virtual, fluid and constant, through works that trouble or disorient viewers. Many of his works exists as websites, which explore generative systems, phenomenology, fiction, and concepts of flow and destruction. Capture, for instance, is home to a “generative netrock” band that produces mashups of words, music, images, and videos ad infinitum. The idea of the mashup occurs throughout Chatonsky’s practice, and he’s also applied the technique to content from social media sites like Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook. Throughout his websites, videos, video games, and other works, a darkness pervades, both literal and figurative. “It is not black that interests me, but rather the night,” Chatonsky says. “Those nights when we perceive everything around you silence people sleeping. The network operates a little this way. We are many, we stand silently next to each other.” (2016)