The Already Dead installation is made up of hundreds of VHS tapes that cover up the walls and floor of the exhibition space. The multiplicity of these elements and the work’s unfinished aspect give the viewer the impression of an ongoing process, a progressive covering up of the exhibition space. Some sort of living entity spreading across the walls like a blob, this lifeform of uncertain nature whose faculty of adaptation and growth baffles the scientific community.
The installation’s title is a pun evocative of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades”, an artistic process that transposes trivial objects into an environment that is different than where they can normally be seen, and where their esthetic and plastic qualities are exploited and experimented. It is also evocative of mounir fatmi’s endeavor to conduct an archeology of the media consisting in the exploration of the implications of modern information and communication technologies and the study of their effects on individuals. The VHS tape, a digital medium for the recording and transmission of information, images and sound that was in its heyday in the 1990s and is today completely obsolete, plays the role of the “dead media” as described by American author Bruce Sterling. A recurring material in the artist’s work, the VHS tape is a way of questioning our civilization and its relation to technology.
This technological architecture, with its multiple circular motifs blurring geometric perspective and spatial markers, irresistibly exercises its hypnotic effects on the viewer. The evolution of information and communication technologies modeled by the Already Dead installation is also given an undeniably ghost-like aspect. Recorded on magnetic tape and now inaccessible, the information takes on a psychic-like and occult aura. In the midst of hyper-technological and sterilized spaces, a certain form of mystery thus makes an unexpected come-back.
In an even more obvious way – and therefore even harder to perceive and appreciate – the installation displays the evolution of social spaces and their structuring by modern information and communication technologies. The Already Dead installation makes the viewer experience the transformation process caused by the frenetic development of technology. “The medium is the message”: in a similar inversion as the one described by communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, a spatial inversion takes places here before the viewer’s eyes. The content becomes the container and the technological medium ultimately constitutes the environment in which the viewer circulates.