This project is inspired by the novel “The Invention of Morel,” published in the 1930s by the writer-philosopher Adolfo Bioy Casares. The plot is based on a particular situation: a group of people has been trapped by a machine that has transformed them into holograms. These holograms are part of a temporal loop, endlessly repeating the same actions on a deserted island. A man fleeing society finds himself on this island and is confronted with these “presences”...
In the context of the late 1930s, this short story addresses the issue of human replication, linked to the emergence of cinema. Bioy Casares, as well as Jorge Luis Borges, both deeply concerned by this new medium, anticipate a major transformation of society in which the image of individuals would become more important than the individuals themselves.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who devoted several of his works to photography, also addresses these questions in “Simulacra and Simulation,” published in the 1980s, just one decade before the advent of the Internet.
The questions raised by these texts are essential today: in a world in which we are required to maintain multiple digital identities and where generative AI creates deceptively realistic avatars, we have become more dependent than ever on our own image.
For this project, the author Frank Witzel and Pierre Jodlowski develop a singular universe that combines a reflection on simulacra with an echo of Bioy Casares’s short story. The result is an environment in which the question of reality is constantly reconsidered—an unstable environment in which it becomes difficult to clearly identify human functions as they operate in a conventional concert. The musicians of PHACE themselves would be trapped in a kind of loop unfolding on the main screen, which gradually absorbs them.
