Farah Khelil

PHOTOS © FARAH KHELIL
Portraits OF DIGITAL PLAYERS
FARAH KHELIL
(TUNISIA)
http://farahkhelil.free.fr
Farah Khelil excavates and exploits data from websites,
archives, illustration captions and various media;
she uses these elements to invent reading devices
that experiment with their esthetic and poetic forms
through technical translation.
PHOTO © D.R.
These reading and translation devices
serve a body of work that she calls software.
They allow us to apprehend the world
through automatically processed information, without transformation or illustration.
As she collects data, she attempts to show
reality as it presents itself to her, with its
share of invisibility. She bears witness to these
scenes of reality, which she names, arranges,
narrates and records in order to see them differently, poetically.
Technique mixte II.
Farah Khelil.
Generative
installation, variable
dimensions and
content (2010-2012).
Made with Pure Data
during the training
course Pure Data
& its multimedia
librairies, Centre
de Ressources Art
Sensitif (CRAS), 2010,
Mains d’Œuvres, Paris.
I’m intrigued by our way of seeing things
around us through media, she says.
These modes of seeing and hearing, especially through television and the Internet,
transform the things captured by the lens
and transferred by their flow, into double
images, into illusions. To me, this world
of circulating images is an unprecendented
source of contemplation and creation. I borrow this translation function of media while
emphasizing what it produces in terms of clichés, captions and viewpoints, as if to say that
reality does not exist outside of the image that
we make of it.
Farah Khelil was born in 1980 in Carthage.
She earned her Master degree in Art Science
and Techniques at the Fine Arts Institute of
Tunis (ISBAT) in 2007. She lives in Paris, doing her Ph.D thesis in Art and Art Sciences,
and has been teaching visual arts at Paris
I Panthéon-Sorbonne since 2010.
Point de vue, point d'écoute (Lectures). Farah Khelil.
Objets-Son exhibition, Palais Abdellia, Tunis, 2012.
Moreover, Farah has contributed to the collective publication Pure Data, Tisser le son et
l’image (Floss Manuals, Mains d’Œuvres) and
discovered the wide range of collaborative
practices online. She perceives the richness
of digital and electronic media, a practice of
technology and language that opens up a field
of possibilities for the visual arts. She believes
that there are no “digital artists” but rather artists who modulate various techniques in order
to offer a panoply of viewpoints on being in the
world and living together. Q
>
POINT DE VUE, POINT D'ÉCOUTE
(LECTURES)
For the Objets-Son exhibition at E-FEST(1) in
Tunisia in 2012, Farah presented an interactive sound installation, made up of a music box, a musical score card and two texts.
The installation is a braille translation, perforated on the music box score, of the lyrics of
a popular Tunisian song (Maouédna Ardhak
ya baladna, written by Amina Fakhet, music
by Milhem Barakat). The generated musical
notes constitute a reappropriated melody derived from the original.
Three modes of interpretation are at play:
the lyrics (printed on the wall), elements of
a collective memory that instantly evoke the
well-known melody; the interpretation of the
score, which provokes a shift between the
song and the sound generated by the music
box; and finally, a quote by Gilbert Simon-
don(2), which introduces an esthetic angle,
creating a dichotomy between the scholarly
and the popular.
TECHNIQUE MIXTE II
This generative piece, presented in the
2012 exhibition Shuffling Cards, Mouvement aléatoire des cartes (art-cade*, gallery
of Les Grands bains douches de la Plaine,
Marseille), began in 2009 with a list of artwork captions collected from art books and
catalogues at the Centre Pompidou library
in Paris. Once detached from their subject,
the captions generate the viewer’s personal
imaginary museum.
The artist wrote a program (with Pure Data)
that converts text into image: by reading
the list of captions, it translates this textual
data into dynamic graphics. Bubbles that attract and collide as if by gravitational force
reference the media bubbles that surround
contemporary artworks. On a model of
quantum particles, the circulation of caption bubbles is the result of their cohabitation on the list. Finally, their diameter varies
according to the number of occurrences in
the source text.
(1) See page dedicated to E-FEST in this issue.
(2) This type of beauty is just as abstract as that of a
geometric construction, and the function of the object must
be understood in order for its structure, and the relationship between this structure and the world, to be properly
imagined and esthetically felt. (Gilbert Simondon, Du
mode d’existence des objets techniques, Éditions Aubier).
Technique mixte II. Farah Khelil.
Generative installation, variable
dimensions and content (2010-2012).
Talmart Gallery, Paris, 2012.
74 - mcd 71 - ARTISTS, INSTIGATORS OF INNOVATIVE PROJECTS, EVENTS, INSTITUTIONS…