TEN WORDS + ONE TEXT - GRÉGORY CHATONSKY

Grégory Chatonsky is a prolific French artist using a large array of electronic media, including the Internet, since the early nineties. Among different strategies, he dissects and redirects flows of information, more often than not placing the user in an uncharted territory.

In « Ten Words + One Text » he addresses the book form as a sequential medium, conventionally maintaining this specific characteristic, but transforming it simultaneously in something which can’t be followed as a continuous stream anymore.
The original artwork consists of ten close headphones. The first one is broadcasting the first word of a book; the second headphone is broadcasting the second word and so on. Each of them leaves silence between the spoken word, so the whole text is formally properly read but it’s unlistenable in its entirety.
In its web adaptation the author makes all the ten different digital audio files available, which are listenable only one by one. The dissection of the text into words in different channels deals with an established artistic mechanism: dismantling a process while building another one with the same whole content and its basic mechanism, but whose output is irrecoverably unusable.

Grégory Chatonsky was born in Paris in 1971 and lives in Montreal and Paris. He studied art at college, philosophy at the Sorbonne and digital art in ENSBA Paris. He founded in 1994 Incident.net, a collective of artists on the Internet. He teaches digital art at universities and art schools such as Paris IV, The Fresnoy or UQAM. His work focuses on fiction, flows and destruction. He works with a variety of analog and digital media by questioning the relationship we have with technology.
http://chatonsky.net/