Art Metropole

#10520

A French American Trip

Artist

Eric Tabuchi

Price

$15.00

Date

2011

Publisher

Matmos Press

Format

Artists' Books

Details

Softcover

Size

19 × 15 × 0.4 cm

Length

72 

Pursuing his pop and serial studies of the French landscape, Eric Tabuchi questions the validity of his photographic method in contrast to the considerable power wielded by the likes of Google, which, via his global digitization company, is at last carrying out a project that is genuinely objective. Thus, contrary to his habitual method of scanning the field, Eric Tabuchi has undertaken the exploration of familiar places, but through this parallel world, the carbon copy of reality that is Street View.Consequently, FAT creates a strain between these two levels of perception, which are henceforth known to all as the virtual and the real, the space of projection and the concrete territory. FAT is America, projected through the realm of the French imagination, digitized by Google and at last, compiled by Eric Tabuchi, as a sort of staggeringly condensed outlook of what globalization could be, in the era of internet. In this respect, FAT is a doubly motionless voyage as it entails visiting America through its emblematic landmarks without leaving France, and what’s more, in front of a computer screen. Residing in Paris during the summer of 2011, Eric Tabuchi, after envisioning this voyage into reality, set out on this virtual “road trip”, making an inventory of businesses – bars for the most part – bearing the name of a city, place or state visible on Street View. In 32 screen captures, two geographies are layered, which, from New York to El Paso, from Villeurbanne to Draguignan, testifies to the gap that divides the “elsewhere” from “here”.