SECONDE NATURE and ZINC are digital imagination incubators working for several years towards fostering and promoting contemporary creation, advancing the understanding of the world in the digital age, and helping audiences appropriate technologies to develop their creativity and emancipation.
The two associations organise the Biennale of Digital Imagination, whose third edition will be held from November 10, 2022, to January 23, 2023. After exploring the theme of Levitation during the first edition, then the concept of Eternity, the topic that will be explored is Night in 2022.
Nighttime allows us to detach ourselves from the hegemony of vision and frees the other senses. From our altered perceptions, shadows of animality, the invisible and the magical arise. “When darkness deprives the seers of vision, the vision of the seers begins”, says Jean de Loisy.
It is the time for dreams and nightmares but also for self-metamorphoses, the transformation of our bodies, our identities and the way we behave. With this creative power, nights have always been seen as a time to be controlled. We are wary of what they permit because the darkness is fertile. Nighttime is always a beginning, not an end, a transition to a new horizon or day.
The appearance of lights in cities was the first milestone in controlling individuals. Little by little, nighttime, especially in urban areas, has been invaded by daytime activities, opposing the city that sleeps to the one that works, the city that wanders to the one that feasts. The title of Guy Debord’s film “In girum imus nocte ecce et consumimur igni”, “We go round in circles at night, and we are devoured by fire”, denounces the invasion of streetlights in our public spaces, a metaphor for our consumer society and alienation.
It is an ambivalent place which sometimes shows its enlightened side and sometimes its dark side. This opposition, between a place of transgression and alienation, pushes some to affirm “that we must save the night”, an essay by Samuel Challéat, evoking the city lights that have killed the night's magic, creating a veil between man and the stars. Does the black of the night still exist when confronted with these nocturnal skies alternately yellowed by pollution and reddened by factory fires? Does this veil not become a barrier to our solitary introspections? Can we still dive into our metaphysical reveries?
Time is continuously revolving around economy and networks, computers and algorithms. It is gradually controlling the pace of our lives, no longer leaving any time for rest and freedom. Is technology even interfering with our dreams? Are our inner nights preserved from technology while it prolongs our lives daily?
These moments of heteropia, of concrete utopias, are perhaps the last frontiers to be explored as terra incognita. Finally, the taste of the night is also a taste of others, of the Other, of meetings and of the unknown, a territory to be preserved. We will see if the night can shed light on another way of being in the world.