Vanishing Workflows (des fleurs de Singapour)

In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard imagines an automatic loom considered the ancestor of the computer. A punch card system allows programming the Jacquard loom, replacing the work of several weavers by a single worker. The workers saw a threat, a direct competition from the machine over the human, which caused a few years later the first uprising of the canuts in France and the Luddites in England.

Today, there are machines that work and generate money autonomously: the “workers”. Connected to the internet, these machines validate transactions on the Bitcoin network, the most popular cryptocurrency. This work is rewarded with a fraction of the transaction processed. Bitcoin is regulated by its users and does not depend on any government or central bank unlike traditional currencies.

Xavier Antin transforms these inexhaustible and disinterested new workers into machine sculptures whose revenues are systematically spent. Worker (flowers), placed at the center of this exhibition, get started periodically to finance the delivery of bouquets of flowers. They fade, dry and accumulate gradually to draw a vanity over the exhibition.

Large, colorful tapestries are suspended in the space to form a garden inhabited by this sculpture and its strange ritual. They are printed by the artist, on purposely transformed large format inkjet printers, whose movement is also a legacy of the loom. The printed patterns come from video shots of flowers, projected on flatbed scanners, creating a crafted printing chain bringing together digital technology and manual gestures.

Already presented at the Hermès Foundation in Singapore last December, this new set of printed fabrics was produced from films made in the parks and gardens of the city-state, known as much for its banks as its tropical climate.

Vanishing workflows (des fleurs de Singapour), the Parisian adaptation of the project, is accompanied by an artist’s book produced between the two exhibitions.

— Works originally produced for the exhibition at Aloft at Hermès thanks to the support of Fondation d’entreprise Hermès —