Non-weddings is the first Google Hack for Image Search. I made it after realizing that image search engines on the Internet had certain similarities with a small drawing by Jacques Lacan from 1957 (“L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient”, Ecrits, Editions du Seuil).
The drawing “Hommes/Dames” by Lacan was proposed as a replacement of Ferdinand de Saussure’s representation of the relation between the signifier and the signified (first picture above).
Exhibitions:
2006: Galerie Sollertis->solo exhibition at galerie sollertis, toulouse
2004: Media Art Net, ZKM, curated by Rudolf Frieling (ZKM/SFMOMA)
2002: Vidarte, Mexico City, Database Desire, curated by Rudolf Frieling (ZKM)
« (…) Another net based project in search of our relationship towards images as a cultural code, more humourous, yet at the same time deeply philosophical, is Christophe Bruno’s Non-weddings which makes use of the ubiquitous Google-apparatus as a search-engine. It employs this tool for a net-based dyptich that is based on the supposed dualism of two keywords that serve as a search tool. The play is, as the author states, on the linguistic set of signifier and signified, on a secondary level on the reading of this set by Jacques Lacan, and on a third level on the friction between language and a mere trace of an image that is only in some arbitrary way related to the search word. Deconstruction, here, is coined “non-wedding”, i.e. the matching of things that do not belong together. The friction is the infinite source of “jouissance”, as the French theorist says. We rejoice in the multiple shifts of meaning that occur between a preconceived notion of a term/image relation and the non-wedded results. We begin to wonder how a term can possibly be related to an image at all. »
Rudolf Frieling, ZKM, for Vidarte, Mexico City
Christophe Bruno 