WILD CARD

The URBAN SPACE, part of the CONFLUENCE INSTITUTE, is proud to announce the first Wild Card of its semester long program.

This week long event is the exhibition of a selected individual, young and promising, developing a discourse challenging our contemporary world.

Between Monday, 16th December 2019 and Thursday, 19th December 2019:
Sarah Lou Maarek, a young architect and artist, will occupy our exhibition space, located at the 11 rue des Arquebusiers, 75003, Paris.
Titled ‘From Furby with Love’ this Wild Card echoes Marshall McLuhan famous affirmation: “ We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us ”.
Using tools spanning from Visual Arts to Architecture, Sarah Lou Maarek is questioning the Y Generation relationship to Intelligent Machines.
In this exhibition, the Furby – a toy with which her generation grew up with – becomes symptomatic of our relation to the so-called smart objects and technologies.
She tries to answer the too often overlooked question:
Why do I sometimes speak to my computer ? ”.
While highlighting our trust in digital entities such as Alexa, Siri or Bixby, she questions our gaze on these personified technologies.

Who is the master ? Who is truly the slave ?

In a context by definition binary, she outlines a third option: the Doll, incarnation of all our digital fantasies and disorders. This – so far unachieved – entity inhabits a speculative world, oscillating between paradoxes: reality and fiction, dream and nightmare, subjection and emancipation, utopia and dystopia; rendering the possibility of a cohabitation between flesh and data, emotions and codes.

From Furby with Love opening: Monday, 16th December 2019 at 7PM.
Confluence Institute – Urban Space – 11 rue des Arquebusiers, 75003, Paris.