Born in 1961 in Brussels to German parents, Carsten Höller applies scientific curiosity to his work as an artist, exploring human behavior, perception, and altered states of consciousness. Many of the projects that comprise his self-described “laboratory of doubt” incorporate disorienting, even hallucinatory experiences that prompt viewers to question how they see and understand the world around them.
Holler emerged as a major figure of the Relational Aesthetics movement of the 1990s alongside artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Andrea Zittel by creating artworks that foster shared group experiences and connections between its audience members. What sets Höller apart is his background as a trained scientist, which has featured into his technologically complex installations that regularly incorporate buildings, lighting, and computer games. After studying olfactory communication in insects at the University of Kiel, where he received a doctorate in agricultural science in 1988, and working as a research entomologist, he returned to art making full-time in 1993. Höller is often associated with relational aesthetics, a strategy, named by curator Nicolas Bourriaud in 1996, focused on human exchange and social context.
Among Höller’s early interactive projects are Flugmaschine (Flying Machine) (1996), a motorized steel armature to which viewers are attached before being hoisted through the air, and Giant Psycho Tank (1999), a sensory-deprivation chamber that facilitates a sensation of being bodiless. For the 1998 Berlin Biennale, Höller initiated what was to become his defining body of work, a succession of giant tubular slides that transform users’ experience of the buildings through which they move. In 2000 he installed a slide in the Milan office of designer Miuccia Prada, and in 2006 he constructed Test Site, a set of five slides in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. Höller is interested in the structures’ imposition of a temporary loss of control on participants, describing the resultant emotional state as “somewhere between delight and madness.”
Höller has also worked with other objects and mechanisms associated with entertainment and play. Amusement Park (2006), a major installation at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, featured full-size carnival rides that operate at dramatically slowed speeds, an unexpected modification that converts them into kinetic sculptures. In 2014, Höller installed the Golden Mirror Carousel at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Completing just one...
Since 2007, Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni have collaborated on several art projects while simultaneously developing their own practices. The two share an interest in community experiences, bad taste, and various forms of subculture.
Fabien Giraud gained notoriety in 2006 with his installation Sans Titre (Rodage) at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France. The work, which presents an impressively strange vision of a community of the future, consists of three computer-controlled minibikes whose motor speeds, and therefore sounds, are controlled by a computer learning program. Situated within the gallery on a platform, the minibikes, at random intervals, would roar and rev up. By means of a computer learning program, each bike could listen to the other and react by offering an ever more deafening sound, until finally the bikes go into unison and produce a “burn” (when the back wheel rubs against the tarmac). The cycle finishes with the roaring of the engines and smoke from the tires, then the program goes back to the beginning. Part sculpture, performance, and experiment in socialization, Giraud puts a new twist on the phenomena of anthropomorphy.
Giraud also organized a concert of hardcore punk music and endeavored to choreograph the crowd. For nine hours, he attempted to organize the movement into the chaotic appearance of pogo sticks by playing upon the various parameters which govern a punk concert. Entitled The Straight Edge (2007), the video is a sculptural experiment in which the crowd and its intensity provide the material.
As for Raphaël Siboni, he recently directed the film Kant's Tuning Club (2006), in which an avatar of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze rubs shoulders with “car-tuning” enthusiasts. In it we see a hypnotic cult scene of a head-on crash between two tuned cars from which Deleuze emerges, half laughing, half-dazed, with inordinately long fingernails. The film intelligently questions the notion of the super-hero of today. It has long been known – particularly since Umberto Eco confirmed the end of the Superman model, the fabulous hero arriving from the planet Krypton, endowed with mind-boggling powers – that there are no longer any super-heroes. "No more super-heroes? Really?" Siboni wonders, adding, "In fact there is only one left, Batman. He doesn’t have any superpowers, but he does have super purchasing power!" The possibility of obtaining (or indeed producing) the ultimate gadget- one that will change the face of the world- can make tuning fans throughout the world dream.
Mixing airsoft, tuning, punk, hardcore, and Guinness Book of World Records, the work of Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni lies at the boundary between art, pop culture, and entertainment. Linking vernacular with mass consumption and folk with pop, their practice tends to produce complex, often spectacular objects and events that question the possibility of contemporary subjectivity. Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni hybridize and give new parameters to practices that have emerged from Pop subculture.
