Robots dance contrary to their nature. Their nature would be mere functionality, but Louis-Philippe Demers inflicts on them the fatigue of functionless functioning: he forces them to dance, to a movement without function and without result. The mechanical devices devised by the two Canadians Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn, one a media artist, the other a composer, transform movement, sound and colour reflections into an experience suspended between art and spectacle. We will see this with our own eyes under the dome of the Mart when the two 'artificial' settings, Le Procès and L'Assemblée, are guests of Oriente Occidente.
But what are these robots like? First of all, they do not have human features, they resemble, if anything, industrial machines, and their behaviour does not tend to reproduce that of humans. They continue in their capacity for coordination, in their mechanicalness to respond to stimuli as programmed. Yet these howling, noisy creatures seem to endure their condition of perpetual movement, they seem compelled to sustain dance, a terrifying dance that, to quote Arnd Wesemann, 'denies death to the dead'. In Le Procès, the audience is on either side of the stage where robots are in action, positioned above and below scaffolding and all around. In a symbolic way, the performance describes the trial - the title is Kafkaesque - of the machines by man, a sort of tribunal where the various identities mingle: judges and judged, victims and executioners are embodied in metallic creatures nourished by our conceptions of the world. A machine attached to the wall is shaken by spasmodic movements. It moves independently triggered by commands whose origin, meaning and purpose remain unknown to the observers. Above a scaffold, on the other hand, two robots move. Two large machines with claws and fingers advance and climb all over the place, even over other machines. Is this intentional or are these movements without purpose? With Demers, any attempt to attribute intentionality to the robot-actors fails, and above all, the behaviour of the machines remains indecipherable to us because it cannot be assimilated to human behaviour. Each machine has its own task to perform, its own cognitive capacities to indulge in in the purest self-referentiality.
And the public? It is forced to take a position by observing its own emotions in the face of this mechanical game.
