Affect TV

2018

w/ co-director Antonin Gerson

Audio / Gwenael Bodet, Antonin Gerson

Acting / Isaac Foxsyth, Etienne Bernard, Pauline Gompertz

Affect Tv est une chaine de télévision parallèle. La réalisation de ce projet fut menée par Antonin Gerson, Isaac Foxsyth, Edouard Le Boulc’h et Gwenael Bodet, et fut présentée durant l’exposition Peripheral Feed a Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain, dans le cadre du programme les chantiers-résidence, mené par l’artiste Edouard Le Boulc’h.

Affect TV occupe la place qui lui est destinée et dévoile une liste de programmes conçus dans le but d’atteindre des affects bien précis.

En bout de table est diffuse sur une Rear LG des années 90, le contenu d’Affect TV émet ses derniers instants. Il s’adresse à quelques globes oculaires dégustant un repas normée de substitution a base de poudre blanche. Ses programmes compose la partition d’un univers visuel et sonores désormais révolu, souvenir d’un monde pas si lointain.

Une variation sur une certaine fin du monde...

It’s a TV show. Apparently a French one, a little dated, from the 1980s perhaps. The set displays vintage audiovisual codes with turtleneck pullovers, neutral greyish backdrops, scanning screens and transparent tables. All of this in a chromatic tone strangely dull for a TV show. It looks like black and white in technicolor … Questioned by a presenter, an American yogi master presents a new reflexology communication program of his invention supposedly revolutionnary in the science of relationships between human beings. On several occasions, the TV signal glitches like on an old VHS tape that starts to tire.

The whole atmosphere summarize pretty well Edouard Le Boulc’h’s approach that stands somewhere in between sophistication, humor and sagacity.

As bleak as it may be, it would be hazardous to reduce Edouard Le Boulc’h’s universe to a simple and applied expression of generational anxiety. But the fact remains that this emerging artist belongs to the first generation which hasn’t known the world before the digital revolution and which now wonders what the communication implied then.

Would there be some nostalgia in his work ? It would rather be a proof of lucidity. And obviously, for the artist, the past and its occurrences are above all a matter of enlightening the present. Forty years after the cathartic film Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1974), in our present society that offers standardized meals of substitution to our varied food, one can admit the young artist’s relevance.

Peripheral Feed is a visual and sound fictional score, a variation on a certain end of the world…

The movie Affect TV, 2018 has been developped in collaboration with Antonin Gerson, Gwénaël Bodet and Isaac Foxsyth.

Etienne Bernard, ex-director at Passerelle Art contemporary Center and director of FRAC Brittany.