Sous Terre (2000)

Website

Vidéoprojecteur, ordinateur / dimensions variables

What does memory look like? Not a memory, but the system we use to catalogue and recall flickering moments or precious feelings. According to Gregory Chatonsky, it looks a lot like the Internet. Systems and memory are the subjects of Sous-Terre, a centenary project for the Paris Metro. It is not often in contemporary art that we can reliably say the medium is the message, but here it just might be true. In the invisible and fractured pathways of the Internet Chatonsky has found the ideal tool to visualise our wanderings – literal and imaginary. Starting with RATP’s visual archives and extending to include textual material from end-users, Sous-Terre is a labyrinthine journey under the streets of Paris, a collective and evolving memory of the city’s echoing corridors and accidental encounters.

The site itself is entirely monochrome, evidence of a certain nineteenth-century fascination with the nooks and crannies of the city, and the anonymous yet strangely intimate encounters particular to a bustling metropolis. If Gustave Doré had Flash technology, or Gaston Leroux wrote interactive fiction, surely this is what it would look like. Chatonsky even played the urban explorer himself – in addition to trawling the archives, he spent days and nights in the Metro, riding aimlessly during the days, shadowing machinists and cleaners in the evenings. The site achieves a certain moodiness, which doesn’t sound like a compliment until you consider the complexity of rendering – more or less controlling – mood on a 9 x 13 inch computer screen.

Chatonsky excels at picking out the technologies and processes central to the Internet experience and linking them to our own thought processes and impressions. His flashes of text, shifting forms, and manipulated images operate in very much the same haphazard way as the human memory. By linking the different networks – Metro, Internet, Memory – Chatonsky creates his own textured circuit, using each network to explore the others. The entrance to the site is clearly the beginning of a story – a mnemonic trigger. Hypnotic eyes are magnified almost to the point of disintegration, and the accompanying sound is both rhythmic breathing and heavy footfall, signalling our entrance into the mental, as well as physical, interior. The text, which begins, ‘Lorsque je prenais le métro, enfant, je faisais de petits spectacles pour faire rire les voyageurs’ (When I travelled on the subway as a child, I put on small shows to make the travellers laugh) is an individual narrative, one that opens the door to the thousands of other moments catalogued on the site. Yet in spite of narrative beginnings, Sous-Terre does not tell a story, instead it drowns you in a series of sensations.

To give any step-by-step account of the site would be to miss the point entirely. There are as many different paths and connections as stops on the Metro. There is a map of sorts, a schematic drawing of rectangular layers, stacked like a Donald Judd floating in space. Each layer is attached to a single image, but once you click in, don’t count on coming out where you started. It is the odd sensation of a dream – you know you’re in your house, but you don’t recognise the room.

The imagery at work in Sous-Terre plays on the Metro’s double-bind of speed and stasis. Chatonsky uses a cinematic approach to both – the cinema and the Metro being prescient siblings born only five years apart. Acronymes Synthétiques (Synthetic Acronyms), one stop on Chatonsky’s imaginary map, is simply a collection of acronyms. They flash past you at the speed of a subliminal Coke ad cut into a feature film. This visual bombardment triggers a helpless feeling of suspension, the ceaseless roaring of a train coming into the station – and like the Lumière brothers’ audience watching the train pull into La Ciotat, we would rather run screaming from the theatre than risk a head-on collision. Chatonsky also uses the language of cinema to articulate the subtle encounters and loaded silences of our daily commute. In Sur Moi, Sous Toi (On me, Under You), close-ups of adjacent passengers turn strangers into Saturday matinee lovers.

Chatonsky is clearly fascinated by the Metro as a ‘no man’s land’, where the possibility for action and exchange is everywhere, yet stasis and anonymity reign. Another stop on the map is called simply L’Attente (The Wait). The image is a turn-of-the-century print of a suited man waiting on an empty platform. A clock ticks in the background. Yet instead of a face, the man has a digitised blur, like a suspect in a witness protection programme. There is a dissonance between the physicality of the older print and the ephemeral nature of the digitally distorted face. He stands on the platform, half man/half ghost – a blind and helpless flâneur.

Though conceived entirely for an Internet format, Sous-Terre is a truly multi-media experience, more about sensation than intellect. Text becomes image, speech becomes music. You feel, in a very real sense, surrounded. Nonetheless, Chatonsky is not afraid of the sometimes mundane interruptions of interactivity. There are several awkward but necessary transitions from the moody depths of the site’s imagery to its function as twenty-first-century archive. At several points users are invited to email their own memories and encounters on the Metro, a Microsoft Outlook window popping incongruously onto the screen.

Unlike the archives of previous centuries, cavernous warehouses filled with greying objects, Chatonsky seems to have found a medium for dissecting as well as collecting memory. There are thousands of clever things on the Internet, intellectually challenging, technically sophisticated and visually appealing. What is rare is to lose yourself – quite literally – in a piece. It is a frustrating journey if you don’t give in. You can try as you like to click your way to a logical conclusion, only to find there isn’t one. Like the Metro, like memory, there’s one way in and one way out – and a million journeys in-between.

(Elizabeth Bard for Contemporary magazine)

Sous Terre (2000)

Website

incident.net/works/sous-terre