I am writing this text in the spring of 2020 in the context of a very particular residency. For reasons that everyone knows, travel and contact have suddenly become impossible. I met Louis Frehring through online video exchanges, which after all is not so bad for discovering the work of an artist who is interested in so-called technological objects, their uses, their implications, and even their thoughts. The health crisis has brought to the forefront notions of data processing, anonymity, traceability and digital isolation that were previously the preserve of specialists or enthusiasts. While a large part of Louis Frehring’s work consists of translating these issues, the world seems to have decided to make them crucial for each and every one of us. For my part, I took part in the exercise of visiting digital workshops which, after all, allowed us to tell other stories.
Louis Frehring is making this shift in perception with one of his projects developed during GENERATOR, soberly entitled Internet ? (2020). He created a bronze Internet router with a precious appearance, designed to contrast with the pseudo-futuristic banality of this device that adorns my living room and no doubt yours. The artist seeks to play with the confusion between device (the box), technology (Internet) and network (Wi-Fi). This work echoes a previous project, which was solely online. Sea of Knowledge (2018) created a dreamlike maritime interface for random navigation on an ocean-Wikipedia. Louis Frehring highlights the paradoxical hypercentralisation of this network, while most of us use, by force of habit and capitalist predation, only a tiny fraction of its possibilities. The visible and invisible facets of this work allow several levels of reading by drawing attention on the one hand to the sculptural aspect and on the other hand to the very precise technical aspect.
Fascinated by these machines, Louis Frehring wishes to develop a psychoanalysis of technical objects. With Image disque (2017) the artist exhibited a computer that read its own image in an endless loop. The object, reduced by the artist to uselessness while using all its technological capacities, was brought to speak of itself, first by representing itself but above all by expressing itself. It had no access to speech, but its operating process and the physical reality of the calculation were made sensitive by the heating of its mechanism and the noise of its fan. During GENERATOR, Louis Frehring took this logic a step further by designing AI Monologue (2020). He once again uses an object that has become commonplace, this time a smart home speaker - I’ll say it right away, I don’t have one, but maybe you do - to which he has given a new envelope but above all a new function. The speaker has been trained to express its own emotional life and its feelings about its existence, via a long monologue. The artist forces the robot to speak - this time literally - in the first person. Fortunately it’s not me he’s asking to monologue to, I would have replied “LOL” and we would have moved on quickly. But this chatty foray into the psyche also demonstrates the limits of this speech. Conditioned by the thousands of sources that are not, or not yet, written by robots, it reminds us that the relationship to technology is above all a social fact.
The installation Le respect de votre vie privée (2020), is an absorbent black and grey carpet, the kind you find in anonymous lobbies with names like CIG OPRENSIA ASSETS or BEST ELEGANCE HOTELS. Instead of the expected logo, Frehring reproduces messages asking for the user’s consent to the use of their personal data, such as: “Your privacy is our priority. By continuing to browse this site, you agree to the use of our visitor evaluation technologies to provide you with an optimal experience tailored to each individual.” With this shift from virtual space to concrete objects, the artist invites a change in the regime of attention. Would visitors make the same decisions outside the virtual space ?
Finally, Louis Frehring moves into more personal territory where interest in technology meets intimacy. In an as yet untitled work, he creates two pieces of jewellery, a pair of silver chains, which together form cryptographic keys using PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) technology. This ultra-secure process is best known for being prized by whistleblowers, such as Wikileaks ones, hackers and drug dealers. From an obscure term reserved for insiders in the dark corners of the Internet, PGP has become a commonplace to the point of entering pop culture through the front door with Booba’s eponymous track in 2019. With his jewellery, Frehring wants to allow two lovers who exchange them to communicate in complete confidentiality and to use PGP to reactivate the coded languages long used by epistolary lovers. The artist takes up the public and private symbolism of jewellery, an object that is ostensibly displayed but whose details conceal many secrets, much to the delight of romance writers.
With this intrusion into sentimentality, Louis Frehring wishes to contribute to a restorative gesture, a gesture that would make it possible to protect lost intimacy with means similar to those that destroyed it. By reducing cryptography to a physical object, however, Louis Frehring pushes this logic to the absurd. The PGP cryptography he uses requires hundreds of characters, and by associating each of them with a pendant link, he creates an inordinate chain several metres long, far too cumbersome to wear. Although the object is functional, retrieving the characters one by one would be so tedious that communication between the lovers would be impossible. Once again, the artist strips technical objects of their primary utility in order to better comment on their construction and social function.
Louis Frehring is interested in both the insides of machines and the ways in which they interact with their users. He uses plastic forms that shift the gaze and question what is taken for granted. For an artist dealing with the Internet, Louis Frehring makes very moderate use of digital technologies: his works are rather sculptural and he pays attention to the level of technological quality he proposes for each object, concentrating on the precise contributions of each material. Frehring does not propose a technological arte povera, however: acquiring and using a screen or a phone is much cheaper and quicker than making a carpet or working on a metal sculpture - which should question the labour relations that determine them, just saying. It is a choice of discourse, in the sense that the artist wants to talk about technology by making it understandable. The artist is interested in information and its dissemination above all through its containers: the networks, the objects through which information transits, the technologies that make it accessible and those that protect it. He insists on the systemic, on what conditions the possibility of existence of these contents. However, he starts from these packages to offer precise and rich accounts, to reveal stories that tell the intimate experience of this very particular relationship.