“WEBRING” WORKSHOP AND PUBLIC PRESENTATION 
by Etienne Cliquet (France)

Artist, professor of Multimedia department at the Toulouse Fine Arts School

http://www.ordigami.net/

In the scope of: “Looking for validations” project curated by Elodie Dufour and Marianna Hovhannisyan.

> PUBLIC PRESENTATION

FEBRUARY 14, 2012, at 12:30

Venue: Armenian Open University, Department of Fine Arts

From 1999 to 2004 Etienne Cliquet has initiated and moderated the Teleferique collective with Sonia Marques: an Internet server dedicated to the downloading of program and digital projects made by artists and programmers. The interface of Teleferique is based on files' repository with the aesthetics by default. Since 2004, his artistic research has focused on the practices of folding in relation with the Internet and computing and he develops an analogy between the fragility of folding, the versatility of the Internet and the precariousness of our life in the contemporary world, at the same time by folding referring to fold everything: not only paper but information and senses, too.

The last part of public presentation Etienne will introduce his recent artistic project called “Datacenters of Art”. The project came out from his long- term and ongoing research in the datacenters, both in France and Canada. It considers the infrastructures of Internet as places for art and new museums/ libraries in our contemporary world. During his stay in Yerevan Etienne will continue this research.

> “WEBRING” WORKSHOP

FEBRUARY 14-22, 2012, YEREVAN

Venue: Armenian Open University, Department of Fine Arts

Webring is a collective online exhibition of young artists from different countries led by Etienne Cliquet and Sonia Marques (artist-professor in the Fine arts school of Limoges, FR). The project brings together about 14 online works by students/young artists and 4 online works by international artists and it will be part of the programming of the virtual space of the Museum of Jeu de Paume in Paris (15th of March, 2012).

Webring - the online exhibition is structured as a ring and firstly it refers to the Webring format from the early Web in 1990’s. A Webring (a ring on the web) is a collection of different independent websites which are linked to each other by the form of a circle. Today, the Webrings have almost disappeared but we want to exhume this format, rethink and reshape its interface with a radically different approach and artistic perceptions.

On the one hand the workshop at the Department of Fine Arts of AOU will be devoted to the realization of online works of art and the discussion between the Armenian participants and the French students (Margaux Berrard, Mélanie Muratet-Campos and Julien Alins) upon the issues of the project on the other hand. Four concepts related to the symbol of the ring will be developed during the Workshop sustained by different tales, legends and stories from several countries and epochs: the cycle of the ring, the haphazard and the ring, the community of the ring, the ring and the invisibility.

At the end of the Workshop there will be realized one collective online project. 

Armenian participants of the workshop: Anuk Sargsyan, Araks Sargsyan, Beno Karapetyan, Edward Hambardzumyan, Emma Babakhanyan, Esfida Galstyan and Jane Ter- Zakaryan.

Organized by:

“Not Valid From” French-Armenian NGO

Department of Fine Arts, AOU in collaboration with Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory 

Partner:

l’Ecole superieure des beaux-arts de Toulouse

Supported by:

French Embassy in Armenia

l’Ecole superieure des beaux-arts de Toulouse

Special thanks to AICA-Armenia.

Etienne Cliquet and French students will be hosted by ACSL in the scope of Art Commune Artist-in-Residency program.