Lauren Huret
The Creature (Boris Magrini)
For the series Net Encounters, Lauren Huret offers her audience the opportunity to commission and acquire a personalized video portrait. For each portrait, the artist creates an interactive photo album based on the results of her online research. In the subsequent video portrait, the artist's hands are seen navigating through the layers of the book. Her voice comments and connects the findings from the web. Physical album pages are repeatedly superimposed with film collages made from fragments of discovered images in social networks. This gives rise to an animated bio-collage that the artist unfolds before the eyes of the subjects, shimmering, polymedial, multi-layered, and fragmented, just like their representation on the web. The first work in this series was created for Boris Magrini, curator at HEK from 2017 to 2023.
Lauren Huret states: "Since the beginnings of social media, people's online behavior has fascinated me. How people share aspects of their lives, how they handle self-presentation, how they promote themselves, etc. (...) Despite my skepticism, I find this phenomenon extremely fascinating, especially the sheer amount of information and images that people willingly put into the public space (…) To put it simply, the audience, you as an art patron, have the opportunity to commission me to create artworks based on your online presence. This is a portrait of the information age in the era of mass exchange. It is a record of an investigation that I will conduct about you, a temporal archive of your online self. No private information from our correspondence or past conversations (e.g., your contact information) will appear in the artwork, only what is found online. As if we were complete strangers. As an artist, I will attempt to understand who you are by following your trail and my instincts, creating a video portrait of you. The final work will thus reflect both my own subjectivity and the person I imagine you to be. It will be influenced by my mood - sometimes prophetic and dramatic, sometimes light and humorous, sometimes strange and absurd. You are the model, I am the painter."
Text by: Bettina Back
