LMY, MY, MY, DELILAH

A typing error in the title of an article published in the New Scientist, «Lmy, My, My Delilah» recalls both the famous hit by Tom Jones «My, my, my Delilah» and the advanced secure speech system invented by Alan Turing in 1943, DELILAH. The typo certainly renders the musical reference somewhat laborious, but simultaneously triggers a sequence recalling the way in which Turing’s machine actually worked itself. A matter of chance, a little mistake. Except that…

Mathieu Schmitt pursues a multi-disciplinary approach in which the interpretation of signals (computer, electrical, radio…) in all their functional, potential and fallible aspects plays a major role. In works such as Glitched, 35 Hard Drive Speakers Playing The Voice Record Of Their Own Title Expanded To The Length Of The Exhibition, Cadavres exquis, Selfconsciousness and Oui Ja, he explores the malfunctioning and appropriation of the virtual signal. Here, Heinz von Foerster, father of cybernetics, interacts with Merleau-Ponty, father of phenomenology. For Mathieu Schmitt

up-dates our sentient environment by introducing artificial intelligence, which he treats as a phenomenon in its own right rather than as a mathematical system.

In his trans-historic vision, Mathieu Schmitt also plays with codes of art, design and architecture, re-interpreting, for instance, minimalism, abstract and conceptual art. The references here consist of plastic signs that the artist combines to obtain meta-works : Armleder encounters Duchamp who converses with Morellet who asks questions of Le Corbusier etc… This takes the form of works such as Sport Elec Architectures, Intérieurs froissés, Unpacked LC2, Topless, Escape From Morellet and Composition Fonctionnelle.

Mathieu Schmitt would thus seem to perceive his creative environment as an algorithm, a finite series of operations or instructions enabling him to solve a problem: but such is not the case. For the artist likes to jam his own machine: by voluntarily introducing an error, a bug, a glitch into his creative process, he produces works in which he leaves room for poetry, mystery and esthetics, a world both «para- and post-human».