Art for Cyborgs

Art for Cyborgs is a hybrid project made up of photographs and texts, which together constitute the first guide to the Louvre to focus on the visitors’ experience inside the museum as well as the exhibited artworks. For the first time in history, millions of people a year visit Le Louvre not to admire its collections first hand, but on their screens. Works that have endured for centuries are now confronted with first-time visitors who refuse to look at them with their own eyes. Contemplation has given way to capturing, facilitated by all manner of digital devices; genuinely Cyclopean devices that roam the museum’s corridors storing everything they see in their inexhaustible memories. The decision to select Paris and the Louvre as the focus of this guide was not arbitrary: they are the world’s most visited city and museum respectively, where visual consumerism is at its paroxysmal peak. Focusing on the visitors’ experience inside the museum is a pretext to reflect upon the rise of a new species disguised as a contemporary tourist: the cyborg, a being with cybernetic processes integrated into its very organism; processes that rework its tools of perception and adaptation, thus engendering a new way of living and being in the world. The cyborg is the hybrid creature paving the way toward a new economic and social era: cybercapitalism, a system that realizes perfection when it transforms individuals into both consumers and products. This is achieved by means of different control mechanisms whose economic and ethical consequences are momentous. Art for Cyborgs explores the main issues at play at this transitional time, before it too, like humankind itself, becomes an anachronism.