What does memory look like? Not a memory, but the system we use to catalogue
and recall flickering moments or precious feelings. According to Gregory
Chatonsky, it looks a lot like the Internet. Systems and memory are the
subjects of Sous-Terre (www.sous-terre.net), a centenary project for the
Paris Metro. It is not often in contemporary art that we can reliably say
the medium is the message, but here it just might be true. In the invisible
and fractured pathways of the Internet Chatonsky has found the ideal tool to
visualise our wanderings – literal and imaginary. Starting with RATP’s
visual archives and extending to include textual material from end-users,
Sous-Terre is a labyrinthine journey under the streets of Paris, a
collective and evolving memory of the city’s echoing corridors and
accidental encounters.
The site itself is entirely monochrome, evidence of a certain
nineteenth-century fascination with the nooks and crannies of the city, and
the anonymous yet strangely intimate encounters particular to a bustling
metropolis. If Gustave Doré had Flash technology, or Gaston Leroux wrote
interactive fiction, surely this is what it would look like. Chatonsky even
played the urban explorer himself – in addition to trawling the archives, he
spent days and nights in the Metro, riding aimlessly during the days,
shadowing machinists and cleaners in the evenings. The site achieves a
certain moodiness, which doesn’t sound like a compliment until you consider
the complexity of rendering – more or less controlling – mood on a 9 x 13
inch computer screen.
Chatonsky excels at picking out the technologies and processes central to
the Internet experience and linking them to our own thought processes and
impressions. His flashes of text, shifting forms, and manipulated images
operate in very much the same haphazard way as the human memory. By linking
the different networks – Metro, Internet, Memory – Chatonsky creates his own
textured circuit, using each network to explore the others.
The entrance to the site is clearly the beginning of a story – a mnemonic
trigger. Hypnotic eyes are magnified almost to the point of disintegration,
and the accompanying sound is both rhythmic breathing and heavy footfall,
signalling our entrance into the mental, as well as physical, interior. The
text, which begins, ‘Lorsque je prenais le métro, enfant, je faisais de
petits spectacles pour faire rire les voyageurs’ (When I travelled on the
subway as a child, I put on small shows to make the travellers laugh) is an
individual narrative, one that opens the door to the thousands of other
moments catalogued on the site. Yet in spite of narrative beginnings, Sous-Terre
does not tell a story, instead it drowns you in a series of sensations.
To give any step-by-step account of the site would be to miss the point
entirely. There are as many different paths and connections as stops on the
Metro. There is a map of sorts, a schematic drawing of rectangular layers,
stacked like a Donald Judd floating in space. Each layer is attached to a
single image, but once you click in, don’t count on coming out where you
started. It is the odd sensation of a dream – you know you’re in your house,
but you don’t recognise the room.
The imagery at work in Sous-Terre plays on the Metro’s double-bind of speed
and stasis. Chatonsky uses a cinematic approach to both – the cinema and the
Metro being prescient siblings born only five years apart. Acronymes
Synthétiques (Synthetic Acronyms), one stop on Chatonsky’s imaginary map, is
simply a collection of acronyms. They flash past you at the speed of a
subliminal Coke ad cut into a feature film. This visual bombardment triggers
a helpless feeling of suspension, the ceaseless roaring of a train coming
into the station – and like the Lumière brothers’ audience watching the
train pull into La Ciotat, we would rather run screaming from the theatre
than risk a head-on collision. Chatonsky also uses the language of cinema to
articulate the subtle encounters and loaded silences of our daily commute.
In Sur Moi, Sous Toi (On me, Under You), close-ups of adjacent passengers
turn strangers into Saturday matinee lovers.
Chatonsky is clearly fascinated by the Metro as a ‘no man’s land’, where the
possibility for action and exchange is everywhere, yet stasis and anonymity
reign. Another stop on the map is called simply L’Attente (The Wait). The
image is a turn-of-the-century print of a suited man waiting on an empty
platform. A clock ticks in the background. Yet instead of a face, the man
has a digitised blur, like a suspect in a witness protection programme.
There is a dissonance between the physicality of the older print and the
ephemeral nature of the digitally distorted face. He stands on the platform,
half man/half ghost – a blind and helpless flâneur.
Though conceived entirely for an Internet format, Sous-Terre is a truly
multi-media experience, more about sensation than intellect. Text becomes
image, speech becomes music. You feel, in a very real sense, surrounded.
Nonetheless, Chatonsky is not afraid of the sometimes mundane interruptions
of interactivity. There are several awkward but necessary transitions from
the moody depths of the site’s imagery to its function as
twenty-first-century archive. At several points users are invited to email
their own memories and encounters on the Metro, a Microsoft Outlook window
popping incongruously onto the screen.
Unlike the archives of previous centuries, cavernous warehouses filled with
greying objects, Chatonsky seems to have found a medium for dissecting as
well as collecting memory. There are thousands of clever things on the
Internet, intellectually challenging, technically sophisticated and visually
appealing. What is rare is to lose yourself – quite literally – in a piece.
It is a frustrating journey if you don’t give in. You can try as you like to
click your way to a logical conclusion, only to find there isn’t one. Like
the Metro, like memory, there’s one way in and one way out – and a million
journeys in-between.
Elizabeth Bard is the Digital Editor for contemporary