After Chapter I (2009), Nihil Ex Nihilo (2010) and Memory Lane (2016), Felix Luque Sanchez returns to iMAL with a new solo exhibition. Eight new creations – produced with his regular collaborators Vincent Evrard, Damien Gernay and Íñigo Bilbao Lopategui – explore different facets of our Automatic Society.

Choreography and performance: Mercedes Dassy / Music: Le Motel & Ben Bertrand.

“Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will?”

— Jean Baudrillard – Why hasn’t everything already disappeared

Industrial robots are designed to perform repetitive tasks with near-perfect precision. They operate without hesitation, exhaustion or loss of concentration. This is the mastery of automation, a synchronised symphony.

From Taylorism to contemporary artificial intelligence, the utopia of automation has become increasingly prevalent. Having already transformed the world of industrial production, it has now taken hold of our thinking, judgement and memory.

This is the age of La Société Automatique (The Automatic Society), the title of a Bernard Stiegler lecture describing the total automation of our lives. All areas of existence are merging into an invisible network of computations; digital utilitarianism is supplanting human decisions, imposing efficiency-driven logic that reduces our scope for action. Technology is becoming the invisible architect of our lives.

An already dystopian present, where education that critically engages with these opaque systems is key in securing the democratic reappropriation of technology.

The exhibition La Société Automatique depicts the anxiety of a post-anthropic world where machines – Sisyphuses devoid of weariness or rebellion – threaten to erase us. A universe of automatons carrying out their self-contained, cyclical work, with no human purpose.

The work of Felix Luque Sánchez, in collaboration with Iñigo Bilbao, Damien Gernay and Vincent Evrard, explores how humans conceive their relationship with technology and provide spaces for reflection on current issues such as the development of artificial intelligence and automatism. Using electronic and digital systems of representation, as well as mechatronic sculptures, generative sound scores, live data feeds and algorithmic processes, they create narratives in which fiction blends with reality, suggesting possible scenarios of a near future and confronting the viewer with her fears and expectations about what machines can do.

—Pau Waelder

Music: Le Motel & Ben Bertrand
Choreography and performance: Mercedes Dassy
Exhibition design: Nel Verbeke