Digital Arts Lecture Series: Antoine Catala

Antoine Catala’s work endows technology with physicality and considers how artificial renderings of forms behind a screen might change our feelings toward them. His video works and internet projects, such as “Distant Feel,” use humor to reveal the ways in which images on the web can be neutralized by way of insincere sentiments or nostalgia. Catala is interested in this underlying structure of his medium—in the collective assumptions we make of images in digital forms, and the ways they can or cannot provoke emotion in scenarios we might encounter. His installation at 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, for example, rendered a professionally-developed logo for "empathy" out of a living coral reef—an animated, inanimate signifier, grounded in branding that simplifies in order to market an emotion you can’t fake. Accidents in technology, either in its use or production, are departure points for Catala’s practice. The artist seeks to discover the ways in which images might demand emotion or thwart them as they “travel virtual and physical distances via the internet.”

Catala has exhibited at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria, Sculpture Center, New York, Espai d’art Contemporani de Castelló, Spain, Fridericianum, Kassel, MoMA PS 1, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia, New Museum, New York, among many other international galleries. He participated in the 12th Lyon Biennale and 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience at the New Museum in New York.

Presented by Pratt Institute’s Department of Digital Arts, in the Spring 2018 Lecture series. Free and open to the public.