Works, installations and projects by Thomas Guillemet

IRRESISTIBLE
The machine put to the test of desire

Salon de Montrouge, October 30, 2021. I am hailed by a few words, “SEND NUDES, I’M SAD,” spelled out in capital letters on backlit panels, artisanal light boxes. It is the section of the Salon reserved for Thomas Guillemet, overloaded with objects: screens, images lit by neon, and assemblages of ceramic, cord, and latex cover prints glued across the entire 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 containing a phone number, to which one can send a text in order to begin a conversation with an artificial intelligence. Whether physically present, modeled in 3D, or photographed, the different elements are caught in complex entanglement, much like the interlacing leather straps that emerge from and return into the mouth of one of the masks on view.

A few months later, I find those same objects in Thomas’s studio in Auvers-sur-Oise. I needed to dig deeper into the conversation we had begun at the Salon, one that had seemed to conceal a richer and more complex practice. Also because Thomas’s work resonated with me on several levels: questions of art and science, but also of the digital and sexualities, were present there and treated in a singular way, nourished by a sustained process of research.

At the crossroads of all these flows

It is with all this in mind that I entered, one day in February, this studio tucked beneath the eaves of an artist’s residence, lit by a vast skylight. Beams run through the space and everything is painted white. Dozens of ceramics are arranged on a table in the center, while leather scraps hang over one of the beams alongside various lengths of rope. I recognize the panels from the latest installation, dismembered and distributed to the four corners of the room. Stoneware slabs lean one against another on the floor, while others whose surfaces have been printed rest on a workbench set slightly apart. In one corner, just where the sloping ceiling forces one to bend down, a plotter. Opposite, Thomas is unpacking more wrapped ceramics, and we begin to talk.

Surrounded by these accumulations of matter, he explains his way of working. A long process of assimilation leads to the formation of these hybrid objects, both in their forms and in their materials. The young artist has paid close attention to what takes place on the internet. He has combed through pornographic websites and forums, whether gaming communities or sex-work exchanges, and has at times even entered into anonymous conversations. He developed a genuine interest in what he might call the “mutations of erotic desire,” in neoporno. His work situates itself precisely at the intersection of all these flows, most of them digital, which he absorbs and from which he brings forth chimerical models and assemblages.

In order to create these new forms, Thomas draws on the way sex toys are designed, on their relation to anatomical mechanics, and makes use of many codes from the pornographic sphere. The letters 4K and VR, for example, cite the way pornographic videos are indexed, a sign of an increasingly technological relation to eroticism. ASMR, meanwhile, reappears in curtains of fake nails, patiently assembled by Thomas, also symbolizing the precise point of contact between body and screen. Finally, the rose emoji used on escort sites as a metaphor for a mode of payment is incarnated by petals fixed in the epoxy resin of certain parts of the installation.

All these examples bring SEND NUDES, I’M SAD close to what might be the aesthetic rendering of a sociological observation of contemporary sexualities. A biased rendering, however, because the objects are diverted, made inoperative. It is hard, in effect, to imagine actually using these sex toys, given their fragility or their complex forms. Yet what is striking in Thomas’s practice is the repeated effort that converges toward material creation. There is, indeed, the desire to give presence to latent phenomena, to perform this translation from the digital into matter. Thomas claims an artisanal protocol of creation, one that fully takes the time matter requires and that he carries out for the most part alone, with his hands. The point is to incorporate an artisanal value into his works, to preserve the possibility that things might remain imperfect, in opposition to a technological mode of making that would tend instead toward perfection.

A resistant relation

That long structured Thomas’s relation to the machine. In the first years of his practice, he maintained a conflictual bond with it. Whether in print processes, digital work, or language, many of his earlier projects emphasized sabotage, such as the Dysfordance series (2014–2021), at the origin of the graphics 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 presented at CNEAI.

Other installations highlighted the incoherence and absurdity of digital technologies, such as It Is Urgent That Progress Be Programmed (2019), which involved a generator of meaningless sentences based on facial recognition. Thomas Guillemet also explored other means of producing mechanical resistance to the machine, notably through off-register print processes recurring in many of his installations, drawing on Wade Guyton’s glitch aesthetic and reintroducing a sense of physicality.

All of these strategies, developed and tested through the artist’s dispositifs, were in some way motivated by a fear of machines, and especially by the fear of becoming one oneself. This is one reason why Thomas’s practice often manifests a desire to deceive, or at least to encrypt, messages so as to divert them from automatic, instantaneous comprehension. This is precisely the point of the ongoing series Bot or not to bot (2014–2021), a compilation of prints present in each of the artist’s installations, on which CAPTCHA-inspired motifs overlap one another until they become illegible, as a way of preventing the works from being too easily accessible and once again asserting resistance.

Building a capacity for adaptation

Yet Thomas’s most recent installations, including SEND NUDES, I’M SAD, seem almost the opposite of resistance. They might even suggest a form of surrender. By largely integrating the notion of desire, Thomas now leads a body of work that nourishes, and even amplifies, the possibility of complementarity with the machine, if not outright hybridization. What I find especially compelling is that it is precisely when Thomas begins to take practices of desire into account that he manages to construct a capacity for adaptation and to propose formalizations of it. In this, his work joins philosophical theories that define desire as a transformative energy.

It is also necessarily through a more carnal approach that the possibility of mutation emerges. If the question of the human had always been present in 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 fully assumed, and the search for hybridity unrestrained. Thomas confided to me that one of his current lines of formal research, in order to continue in this direction, would be to create a fantasized robotic-erotic, even pornographic form with no human or anatomical referent at all. This aligns with the idea of transmachinism that he defends, a notion related to but opposed to transhumanism, insofar as it means accepting that the machine preexists us, and therefore choosing to adapt ourselves to it rather than vainly attempting to surpass human faculties.

What is also rich in Thomas Guillemet’s work is that we find ourselves exploring territories not so far from those described by Donna Haraway, but by way of the machine rather than necessarily from a feminist standpoint. The way Thomas addresses these issues is therefore resolutely contemporary, because his relation to the digital inevitably also engages a relation to gender. His work is itself hybrid. It seems to me particularly compelling, from a critical point of view, to observe a young contemporary artist primarily interested in the digital now shifting toward questions of gender and sexuality.

Perhaps a revolution has taken place

This marks our contemporary moment, within which discursive porosity has perhaps become more evident. Thomas, now thirty-two, has himself come into contact with such discourses through his research, which has also led him to testify to the ordinary relation newer generations maintain with the mixing of desire and technology. We ended our discussion by evoking Gen Z’s relation to virtuality and its much more evident propensity for mutation.

Indeed, perhaps a revolution has taken place over the last ten or fifteen years. That is, from an open-source internet that promised both total freedom and self-invention, one Thomas regrets and which also formed the core of the exhibition I Have Done Things Here I Couldn’t Do Elsewhere, which he curated in 2019 at 6B, perhaps we moved into an internet governed by regulation and formal identity, only to arrive today at a metaverse paradigm, no doubt capable of redefining on a large scale what relation to self means and of recalibrating modes of hybridization with the machine.

What we therefore see is a succession of moments of resistance and adaptation between the human and the machine, which Thomas’s practice, in contact with the most contemporary discourses, translates particularly well. Next, the young artist will turn to climate change and the environment, through a project for the United States. The idea will be to make American data centers interact with the surrounding botanical milieu, through an extended process of research and information gathering.