"Being in the Garden of Forking Paths“ Salomé Chatriot, Crosslucid, Pola Sieverding

My thumb presses on the screen of my smartphone. I slowly click through the windows that open here and there, continually steering me in a different direction. Sometimes I forget what I started with. I lose myself, get stuck somewhere, click elsewhere, and end up in another place again. Quickly, a few minutes turn into a quarter of an hour, half an hour, an hour, and time itself becomes increasingly relative. With my thumb, I click from app to app, page to page, hyperlink to hyperlink. With each click, new possibilities of "different futures, different times, which also proliferate and branch out“ (1) open up to me—sometimes consciously, sometimes less so. A garden of forking paths—a labyrinth, as Jorge Luis Borges described in his eponymous short story in 1941—a hypertext avant la lettre.

The engagement with a seemingly endless variety of possibilities in light of new digital technologies and (generative) artificial intelligence, which branch out in countless directions and each lead to different futures, underpins the exhibition Being in the Garden of the Forking Paths at the OFFICE IMPART gallery. In this complex landscape, the three, albeit very different, artistic positions of Salomé Chatriot, CROSSLUCID, and Pola Sieverding seem to converge into a common path: a path of touch or encounters between bodies and machines and new hybrid gestures. (...)

Text by Prof. Dr. phil. Marie-France Rafael