In the exhibition space, a pick-and-place robot hangs from a large metal structure in the centre, drawing abstract shapes. The robot must search for and move thousands of coloured pharmaceutical pills to draw the data generated by a computer program.

This software, composed of a series of algorithms, simulates the generative processes of the synapse. The results are a series of “paintings” formed by thousands of colour dots, which represent an ongoing evolutionary process.

It is a perpetual performance that exists only over a very long time, a temporality that escapes that of the visitors. The robot analyses its tasks and works endlessly with or without an audience.  It’s an infinite, unique and titanic task that unfolds in real-time.

This algorithmic blob becomes in the exhibition space an anthropomorphic performance where the digital and the natural, the synthetic and the human, the choreography and the repetition, the fluidity and the matrix, the robot and the spider, blend together.

Industrial robots are conceived to perform repetitive tasks with almost absolute precision. They perform them without fatigue, without rest, without loss of concentration and without hesitation. This is the mastery of automation, a synchronised symphony.

In the installation series "perpétuité", we want to stage industrial machines in endless tasks guided by algorithms, in a kind of perpetual performance.

The vision we are trying to represent is that of our realization through the technological dream. When human society is faced with the capitalocene, the eternal becomes a new task for our machines, a utopia in a future without humanity.

We face our extinction as our technological creations, our machines, overtake us as masters of repetition, collaborative work, data and computation. But they also replace Sisyphus, condemned like him to repeat and undo a task in perpetuity.

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Perpétuité II by Félix Luque, Vincent Evrard & Damien Gernay

Perpétuité II is a coproduction of  “secteur arts numériques, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles”, "Chroniques 2022 (Biennal of Digital Imagination)” and iMAL.