LES DISCIPLINES DU RECTANGLE
is an interactive art installation made of 7 steles set up in a 200m² space. Each stele is made of one webcam, one screen and one speaker. When a player stands in front of a stele, his body is detected and a virtual rectangle is drawn around him. The rectangle starts to move and to change of shape. The goal is to stay inside the rectangle without touching its borders. The game stops when there is a contact between the rectangle and the player’s body. For the audience, nothing is visible except the player’s performance. It is the player’s body who creates the show based on the contrast between what is displayed on the screen (the picture of its own body put inside a geometrical shape) and the emptiness of the « real » space. Each stele provides a specific choreography, based on the behavior of its rectangle. The whole set up produces a choreography which evokes a mix between a sport training room and a performance art space.Inspired by Michel Foucault’s work, Les disciplines du rectangle is a videogame proposition about the nature of rules and norms at the digital age. If society provides models of accomplishment we are supposed to fit inside, then the rectangle is the pure abstraction of this idea. The geometrical shape works as a symbol of the very nature of normativity, blind to individual differences. The rectangle, existing only on the screen, reveals how digital technologies can in some ways become the new location for this normativity and the ambivalent results of their intangible and invisible nature. Besides, the installation offers an occasion to think about the way games can become manipulation tools. The fact that in the end, players act as if they were piloted by the rectangle (an inversion of the traditional relationship between player and avatar) gives an aesthetical highlight to this.