Atlab

Text by Terence Sharpe

Laurent Lamarche’s objects strike a scientific chord in contrast to an art world overwrought with digital spectacles and ominous critique. Lamarche’s work bares a rigorous formalism imbued with indexes to-wards the ever difficult area of art and technology. Developing an art so rooted in the bio-political that is primarily formalistic is a difficult task indeed. We must also concern ourselves that the art object as object of knowledge is a pressing concern. It is our duty to use objects such as those found in Lamarche’s oeuvre as prompts to develop new critical epistemologies.

Many of his work displayed in bell jars have a distinct ambience recalling cyber-hybrid developments. In other works one examines amoeba-like structures threaded through with mechanical skeleton, they appear as nu-cryptophyte algae, all done from the vantage-point of a microscopic lens peering into a petri dish. In some pieces we find prosthetics, again instilling a sense of the hybrid. All against a backdrop of the clini-cally white, artificially reduced.

The bio-technological force at work in these objects bears significance in the infrastructure surrounding their content. Collectively his works indicates to us that it has become necessary to read into objects as indexes of wider cultural and cognitive processes within newly emerging paradigms of a technologically complex world. In discussing these works as objects there can be a reinterpretation of radical technologies that separate humans and machines that realises that agency is not a property of an entity, but produced through objects that generate discursive practices.