Agnès de Cayeux is a French visual artist whose work focuses on the question of the vulnerability of technologies, their hold on our bodies and our landscapes. Since 2017, she has been an associate artist at the Faculté d'Arts d'Amiens. http://www.agnesdecayeux.fr
His first online creations - 12 notes (1999), I'm just married (2002), In my room (2004) - were developed in the context of an emerging web. The network space through which these creations are offered to the public becomes its own subject. A territory hijacked and questioned in the 2005 piece In my room: networked literary performances for 7 women, in which the audience is simultaneously present in the physical space of the art center and in front of the connected computer screen. The pieces that follow - Level 7 (2006), Justagurl23 (2007), Beyond California Sex offenders (2011) are written in the context of a web taking on identity through the very nature of social networks.
It was in 2011, and after long preparation, that Agnès de Cayeux began to question the Internet in a different way. She spent 2 months in Greenland, in order to understand an image seen on the web, that of a Data Center in Nuuk, and the announcement of a powerful fiber optic technology implemented by Denmark. Thus, in keeping with the principle of reality, the artist works from the following presupposition: "In 20 years, our ice floes will have disappeared. In 20 years, the Internet industry will consume as much energy as we consume on the planet today".
Her work raises the question of memory, and the materiality of the Internet becomes central. During the period of the pandemic, Agnès de Cayeux worked on the relationship between the invisibilization of women (researchers, scientists and/or artists) and that of ancient techniques (stereoscopy) appropriated by GAFAM under the banner of virtual reality.
In 2023, Agnès de Cayeux heads back to Greenland with performer Maëlla Mickaëlle to shoot a series of 360 films, an eco-technological project littered with the stories of women explorers, writers and dreamers.
THE PROJECT
"360 notes prises au Nord is a poetic and political immersive work: an experience of the Far North that goes beyond the virile and heroic imaginary of polar expeditions. Between VR and a cabinet of curiosities, Agnès de Cayeux takes us in the footsteps of 5 women artists, scientists and politicians who have explored and thought about this exceptional territory from the 19th century to the present day. She uses virtual reality as a means of revealing these invisibilized narratives, and gives these women a place in contemporary collective representations of the Far North."