Carnet

French-American artist Marc Fichou takes us on a fascinating journey into his creative process with this publication of his Carnet, one of many notebooks he has filled with the thoughts, puzzles, and lines of inquiry that have guided his work over the years in a variety of media, from video installation to sculpture and painting. This book lies in between image and text but also philosophy and art, even memoir and fiction. Do we look at it or read it? Or do we practice both at once, wrestling with the differences between seeing and thinking, contemplation and action, beauty and truth?



Fichou takes this ambivalent experience as a starting point for explorations of a personhood that, defined since Descartes as a subjective "inner life" (core or essence) we control and express, feels increasingly decentered, networked, and cybernetic. At the interfaces of the human and the machinic, the organic and the technical, he looks to the imaginative possibilities as well as the dangers that exist for people who no longer exactly know themselves through traditional categories of identity, intention, autonomy. . .and even art itself.