PARIS.- Born in 1975 in Seoul (South Korea), Daphne Le Sergent lives and works in Paris. With her roots in two cultures, her research domain includes notions of schize and deterritorialisation. Her work involves various systems of assembly and disassembly, cut-up and erasure. It raises questions about the construction of identity by proposing an analysis of border landscapes as a phenomenon of perception comparable to a screen. This work has led her to reflect on the question of organisation and devices in contemporary artistic creation. Fragments of text, partitioned drawings, photographic diptychs and video sequences question the lines of subjectivity that run through an image and bind the elements together.

Invited as part of the Satellite 11 programme, entitled ‘NEWSPEAK_‘, Daphné Le Sergent presents the second movement of the cycle, Geopolitics of Oblivion, which, in today’s world of data deluge, raises questions about the ‘C vocabulary‘, the technical language in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Geopolitics of Oblivion is a vehicle through which the artist explores the industrialization and outsourcing of memory in the post-digital era, imagining two fictitious retrofuturist communities, the Sum and the May, where an alphabet has been created to free human memory from the complexity of an image-writing code based on glyphs, pictograms or ideograms. The artist explores digital archiving from two distinct forms of writing: on the one hand, cuneiform writing, which appeared earlier than 3,000 BC and was invented to memorize debt and to exploit data relating to this transaction. This is the model we use nowadays to conceive of memory when we keep information in data centres. The other form of writing is Mayan script (6th-9th century CE), which records the movements of the stars for future generations. Writing is not thought of here as a tool for capitalising on something past but for its predictive capacity. Today, when new ways of going about writing have resulted from the use of screens, from new interactions between the eye and the hand, and from communication through photographs, gifs and emojis based on stylised images and models as well as samples from animations, one is led to ask what behaviours are generated by this language. Actions resulting from this kind of information processing include archiving, editing, collecting, copying, and merging.

Thanks to the outsourcing of memory – the Cloud –, with its infinite storage capacity, the new Babel formed by the Sum and the May sets out on a quest for a universal language. Each of them uses both kinds of writing in order to transform images into a proto-script by means of graphic compression; the aim is to use this for recording their history. The May have recourse to scanpaths and linearity resulting from eyetracking, which follows the trajectory of the eye in interpreting a virtual image. The Sum turn to ‘emotional objects‘, objects of non-verbal communication, devised in order to plot the internet user’s emotional state, thus creating a new rhetoric. Geopolitics of Oblivion presents a battle of signs. ‘Once uttered, […], speech enters the service of power,‘ said Roland Barthes. Where Newspeak was an attempt to restrict thought by limiting words, the digital image also presents itself within a broad spectrum of synthetisations, transforming what can be felt into a mere value that can be provoked. For William Burroughs the cutup method was a potential ‘letting-go of consciousness‘. These post-digital tools and signs seem to invite us to write our own archaeology of knowledge.