Since 2007, Fabien Giraud and Raphaƫl 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 āburnā (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 RaphaĆ«l Siboni, he recently directed the film Kant's Tuning Club (2006), in which an avatar of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze rubs shoulders with ācar-tuningā 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 ā particularly since Umberto...
Since 2007, Fabien Giraud and Raphaƫl 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 āburnā (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 RaphaĆ«l Siboni, he recently directed the film Kant's Tuning Club (2006), in which an avatar of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze rubs shoulders with ācar-tuningā 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 ā particularly since Umberto Eco confirmed the end of the Superman model, the fabulous hero arriving from the planet Krypton, endowed with mind-boggling powers ā 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 doesnāt 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 Raphaƫl 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 Raphaƫl Siboni hybridize and give new parameters to practices that have emerged from Pop subculture.
