IRRESISTIBLE
The machine put to the test of desire

Salon de Montrouge, October 30, 2021. I was struck by these few words, SEND NUDES, I’M SAD, written in capital letters on backlit panels. This is the section of the exhibition devoted to Thomas Guillemet, saturated with objects: screens, neon-lit images, and assemblages of ceramics, cords, and latex cover prints installed across the full surface of the walls. Some borrow their curves and dimensions from sex toys, others from BDSM accessories. One of the screens loops a futuristic animation featuring a phone number to which a text can be sent in order to begin a conversation with artificial intelligence. Whether physically present, modeled in 3D, or photographed, the various elements are intricately entangled, much like the interlaced leather straps that enter and exit through the mouth of one of the masks on display.

A few months later, I encountered these same objects in Thomas’s studio in Auvers-sur-Oise. I needed to deepen the conversation we had begun during the exhibition, which had seemed to hint at a richer and more complex practice. Thomas’s work resonated with me on several levels: the fields of art-science, but also digital culture and sexuality, were all present there, handled in a singular manner and sustained by rigorous research.

At the intersection of all these currents

With all of this in mind, I entered one day in February into this studio, tucked beneath the rafters of an artist residence and illuminated by a vast window. Beams cross the space; everything is painted white. Dozens of ceramics are laid out on a table at the center, while leather scraps and lengths of rope hang over one of the beams. I recognize the panels from the latest installation, dismantled and dispersed to the four corners of the room. Stoneware slabs lean against one another on the floor, while others, their surfaces printed, rest on a workbench further back. In one corner, right where the sloped ceiling requires one to bend, sits a large-format printer. Across from it, Thomas unwraps other packed ceramics, and our conversation begins.

Surrounded by these accumulated materials, he explains his way of working. A long process of assimilation gives rise to these hybrid objects, both in their forms and in their components. The young artist paid close attention to what was happening on the internet: he combed through pornographic websites and forums, whether devoted to gaming or to the exchange of sexual services, and at times entered into anonymous conversations himself. He developed a genuine interest in what he calls the “mutations of erotic desire,” or néoporno. His work is situated precisely at the crossroads of these mostly digital flows, which he ingests before generating chimerical models and assemblages.

In order to create these new forms, Thomas draws on the way sex toys are designed, their relation to anatomical mechanics, and he mobilizes numerous codes from the pornographic sphere. The tags 4K and VR, for instance, cite the ways pornographic videos are indexed, signaling an increasingly technological relation to eroticism. ASMR surfaces in curtains of fake nails, patiently assembled by Thomas, which also symbolize the very point of contact between body and screen. Finally, the rose emoji used on escort sites as a metaphor for a form of currency takes material form in petals fixed within the epoxy resin of certain parts of the installation.

All of these examples bring SEND NUDES, I’M SAD close to what might be the aesthetic rendering of a sociological observation of contemporary sexualities. Yet it remains a skewed rendering, since the objects are diverted from use and rendered inoperative. One can hardly imagine actually using these sex toys, given either their fragility or their complex forms. What is striking in Thomas’s practice, however, is this repeated effort toward material realization. There is a desire to give presence to latent phenomena, to perform this translation from the digital to matter. Thomas claims an artisanal protocol of creation that takes the full time matter requires and that he carries out mostly alone, with his own hands. It is about incorporating artisanal value into his works, preserving the possibility of imperfection, in opposition to a technological mode of making that tends toward flawless execution.

A resistant relationship

This long shaped Thomas’s relation to the machine. In the first years of his practice, his relationship to it was a conflicted one. Whether in printmaking, digital work, or language itself, many of his earlier projects foregrounded sabotage, as in the series Dysfordance (2014-2021), which lies at the origin of the graphic design for the exhibition Go Canny! at Villa Arson in 2017, or the implementation of strategies of micro-resistance, as in the project Bored At Work (2017), presented at the CNEAI.

Other installations also highlighted the incoherence and absurdity of digital technologies, such as It Is Urgent That Progress Be Programmed (2019), which features a generator of nonsensical sentences based on facial recognition. Thomas Guillemet also explored other means of opposing mechanical resistance to the machine, notably through off-register prints that recur in many of his installations, borrowing from Wade Guyton’s use of the glitch and restoring a sense of physicality.

All of these strategies, tested and developed within the artist’s dispositifs, were in a sense motivated by a fear of machines, and more precisely by the fear of becoming one oneself. This is one of the reasons Thomas’s practice often involves a desire to deceive, or at least encrypt, messages so as to divert them from any automatic, immediate understanding. This is precisely the premise of the ongoing series Bot or not to bot (2014-2021), a compilation of prints present in each of the artist’s installations, in which motifs inspired by CAPTCHAs are superimposed until illegible, as a way of preventing the works from becoming too easily accessible and of asserting resistance once again.

Building a capacity for adaptation

And yet Thomas’s more recent installations, beginning with SEND NUDES, I’M SAD, seem to stand at the very opposite of this idea of resistance. One might even say they embrace a form of yielding. By integrating the question of desire so fully, Thomas is now at the head of a body of work that nourishes, and even amplifies, the possibility of complementarity, even hybridization, with the machine. What I find especially compelling is that the moment Thomas takes the practices of desire into account is also the moment he constructs a capacity for adaptation, and proposes forms for thinking it. In this, his work converges with philosophical theories that define desire as a transformative energy.

It is also through a more carnal approach that the possibility of mutation emerges. While the question of the human had always haunted Thomas’s obsessions, it appeared there only in the negative, as a dichotomous opposition to the machine. Now, the relation to the body is far more openly assumed and the search for hybridity unmistakable. Thomas confided to me that one of his current formal research trajectories is precisely to create a fantasized robotic-erotic, even pornographic form that would contain no human or anatomical referent whatsoever. This connects to the idea of transmachinisme that he defends, a notion both akin and opposed to transhumanism, insofar as it means accepting that the machine preexists us, and therefore choosing to adapt to it rather than attempting, in vain and sterile fashion, to surpass human faculties.

What is equally rich in Thomas Guillemet’s practice is that one finds oneself exploring territories not far removed from those described, among others, by Donna Haraway, but by way of the machine, and not necessarily from an explicitly feminist perspective. The way Thomas addresses these questions is resolutely contemporary, because the digital inevitably implies a relation to gender. His work is itself hybrid; and from a critical point of view, it seems particularly compelling to observe a young contemporary artist primarily concerned with the digital now turning toward questions of gender and sexuality.

Perhaps a revolution has taken place

This is symptomatic of our present moment, in which the porosity of discourses has perhaps become more visible than ever. Thomas, now thirty-two, has himself come into contact with these discourses through his research, which has also led him to bear witness to the ordinary relation newer generations sustain with the mixing of desire and technology. We ended our conversation by evoking Gen Z’s relation to virtuality, and its seemingly far more evident propensity for mutation.

Indeed, perhaps a revolution took place ten or fifteen years ago: we moved from an open-source internet that was at once total freedom and self-invention, which Thomas misses, and which lay at the heart of the exhibition I Have Done Things Here I Couldn’t Do Elsewhere, which he curated in 2019 at 6B, to an internet ruled by regulation and formalized identity, before arriving today at a metaverse paradigm, one capable, no doubt, of redefining on a massive scale our relation to ourselves and of recalibrating modes of hybridization with the machine.

We therefore witness successive moments of resistance and adaptation between the human and the machine, which Thomas’s practice, in touch with the most contemporary discourses, renders particularly clearly. His next project, in the United States, will turn toward climate change and the environment. The idea will be to make American data centers interact with their surrounding botanical milieu, through a long process of research and data collection.