WF Online Series 2024
Focus: collectif_fact
24 - 31 October 2024
Welcome back to the 4th edition of the WF Online Series. In this focus, we engaged with Annelore Schneider and Claude Piguet of collectif_fact. They lived and worked between London and Geneva and taught respectively at Goldsmiths MA Design and HEAD Geneva, Image-Sound Pool. Their work, primarily video, reflected on contemporary image economies, surroundings, production, and consumption. Their practice investigated the pervasive, alienating, and ecological impacts of images on our contemporary lives using speculative worlds and fiction production.
Collectif_fact used narration, cinematographic codes, and editing to speculate and investigate how narratives could be appropriated, disrupted, and re-edited. Their videos mixed a complex set of references from 3D scans, snippets of film dialogues, and archival images to sound extracts. A collage of familiar and recognizable images emerged, with a multitude of allusions to our visual culture. Collectif_fact played with our desire to be drawn in and deceived by these images, encouraging the viewer to critically reflect on the habits that conditioned our perceptions of reality.
We explored the staggering statistic that more than 15 billion images were generated using text-to-image algorithms last year alone. This phenomenon starkly contrasted with the 150 years it took for photographers to produce the same number of images from the inception of photography in 1826 to 1975. This unprecedented surge raised significant questions about the role and impact of images in our daily lives, especially as they permeate our screens for over 7 hours each day. Scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, W. J. T. Mitchell asked: “Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things for us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray?”
Annelore and Claude helped us understand what it means for contemporary artists to navigate this flood of visual content. They reflected on how this abundance of imagery affected our perception, behavior, and even our beliefs.
We uncovered the complex relationship between visual culture and technology through the lens of collectif_fact. Their unique approach to deconstructing cinematic codes and narratives offered a compelling critique of our image-saturated world, encouraging us to critically reflect on the habits that shaped our perceptions of reality.
The film program was available starting October 24th for one week. Our audio interview was made available simultaneously and remains accessible afterward in the Listen/Read section of our website.
Film program
A World Without Them
by collectif_fact, Annelore Schneider & Claude Piguet
UK & Switzerland, 2023, 9 min 02, sound
A documentary-based video that looks at the extinction of stock footage images. The narrator provides commentary on the images’ behaviour, intricate habits, and the challenges that put them on the endangered species list. These images are part of our visual cultural DNA, for beVer or worse, perpetuating bias and stereotypes. They are an archive of the present that is currently feeding AI datasets and generating the next generation of images.
White Shadow
by collectif_fact, Annelore Schneider & Claude Piguet
UK/CH, 2021, 10 min, English
In this speculative fiction, all the photos have suddenly turned into the objects they represent. The video depicts a vertiginous architecture, so devastating that it created borders and isolated people. Piles of selfies, cats, and meals are scattered everywhere. Messages evoke a new society suffering from media saturation, sensory overload, and crushing ecological impact. A world where images have taken over, invading and transforming space.
No Picture, No Glory, or the Triumph of Apophenia
by collectif_fact, Annelore Schneider & Claude Piguet
UK & Switzerland, 2016, 6 mins 50, English
The National Gallery visitors are photographed with smartphones in their hands as they explore the gallery. Their gestures underlay the ones found in the paintings. Postures, attitudes, and bodies are juxtaposed and choreographed in this brisk sequence of photographs and details of paintings captured on the spot. Viewers and the object of their gaze merged, and the number of images produced constantly escalated.
The video editing was deliberately assisted by image analysis and indexing software. So, the people and paintings being filmed find themselves caught up in a scenario devised by a technology that is endlessly recording, selecting, framing, duplicating, and saving images for us.
The Fixer
by collectif_fact, Annelore Schneider & Claude Piguet
UK & Switzerland, 2013, 8 mins 25, English
A “script doctor,” someone you call upon to improve a scenario by editing out characters or scenes, talks about his work as though he is a hitman. Alongside his voice are photographs of people who regularly frequent the Barbican Centre in London. At times, these visitors become actors in deleted scenes and other times, the killer’s victims.
The images produced for the video trigger our collective memory about action and crime films. Random people seem to be watching and following each other. The Barbican is transformed into a stage and everyday life into a thriller that surveillance pictures unfold for us.
Circus
by collectif_fact, Annelore Schneider, Claude Piguet & Swann Thommen
Switzerland, 2004, 5 mins 23, sound
The video shows a constantly moving view of the city, that seems to disintegrate. Based on photographic documents, the artists have re-created, with 3D software, a square in Geneva using only flat 2D images. It results in an accelerated, non-linear perception of our environment that refers to how we navigate and appropriate urban structure. Every urban space is now photographed, recorded and accessible online. Its visual documentation has become as immediate, intrusive, and striking as the actual space.