Jonah Freeman, The Franklin Abraham, 2003Since 1994 VERSION has organized shows, projections, performances and debates on works that explore the different facets of this emerging culture.
Thus, in a recurrent, critical way, VERSION is organized around a theme, creating a subjective link between the featured works of art. This enables one to bring out the articulations between works that point up, each in its way, the convergences, contradictions and limits of the chosen theme.
VERSION 2004 SIMulation CITY follows up on the last biennial, The Inhabitable Image VERSION 2002, which delved into the perception of concrete and virtual structured space. This year’s event addresses the question of the contemporary urban city as a project of social organization, on the one hand, and as the focus of a number of imaginative worlds linked with the utopian city, on the other. The latest technologies, a source of fears as much as hopes, are the principal supports for these new representations. It is this utopia then that the artists and other participants in VERSION 2004 SIMulation CITY set out to analyze.
Within the distorting mirror of a world saturated with mass-media coverage and multiple virtual spaces, the question of freedom and artmaking, of copyrights, of protecting or freely sharing data lies at the heart of new ethical and legal tensions. The international symposium Droits d’images / Image Rights will bring to light what is newly at stake in the creation of art vis-à-vis a cultural industry that is continually developing and protecting its business by taking advantage of today’s technological advances.
André Iten
Director of the Centre for Contemporary Images
