Magic Electronics
The smell of a squashed tomato on the floor can bring about a whole chain of memories. Even if you don’t smell the tomato in my film, you see the smell, your memory will trigger it. I like it when people say, ‘oh, your films stink.’ I like bringing in another sensation with only pixels…
—Laure Prouvost, "How to Keep up with the Past," interview with Laura Herman in Metropolis, April 21, 2014.
Magic Electronics is a 2014 work by French artist Laure Prouvost, in which she installed moving lights and synched audio into a gallery in order to animate and narrate her exhibition of objects. In doing so, she transformed the static exhibition into a stage. Magic Electronics is exemplary of an approach that slips between formats (video, sculpture, installation) and registers (speech, image, object, light), deliberately mistranslating and misunderstanding as it goes.
Magic Electronics figured as the center of an evening-long conversation between Prouvost and EMPAC curator Vic Brooks during which the pair screened and discussed a selection of Prouvost’s work, taking the audience on a journey from the pre-recorded and situated to the live and one-off. Prouvost was in residence at EMPAC to develop a new performance, which will be premiered alongside her solo exhibition at Walker Art Center in 2017–18.
Main Image: Magic Electronics 2016. Photo: Courtesy the artist.