Production le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains
“Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, sometimes exceedingly beautiful.” I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter
I/Play is an interactive installation that treats the self not as a fixed image, but as something continuously formed through contact, disappearance, and relation. When visitors enter the detection zone, their image first appears in front of them, then gradually dissolves into hundreds of particles. Some of these fragments remain in the virtual space even after the visitors have left, merging with the traces of those who came before them. The installation creates a constantly evolving landscape of accumulated presences. The color of the particles changes according to the clothing worn by each visitor, inscribing every body into the memory of the system. As visitors move, their traces drift, settle, and interact, generating a shared choreography in which individual presences begin to communicate with one another. The French title Je(u) plays on the French words je, meaning “I,” and jeu, meaning “play” or “game.” Here, the “I” is never entirely self-contained. It is produced through interaction, altered by proximity, and carried by the residues of others. The boundary between you and me becomes porous: each presence extends into the others, and each leaves something behind. Built with a custom particle system, I/Play proposes identity as a collective improvisation rather than a stable essence. At a time when identities are often used to draw fixed borders between bodies, cultures, and forms of belonging, the work imagines the self as porous, relational, and unfinished. In this fragile and shared field, the self appears not as a possession, but as something we temporarily form together.
