Barcelona-based French artist Thomas Charveriat creates installations that use GPS, SMS, video, sound, electronic data to interact with the viewer in a peculiar environment, where the complexity and elegance are combined to create sensorial ambiguity associated with an atmosphere of vulnerability and apprehension.

The artist has lots of appealing projects, such as Light Creates Sound (in collaboration with Mohammad Mobaseri), in which a torch is flashed at a rectangular panel hanging on the wall, producing the sound of voices which vary depending on the area onto which the light is projected. Inside the panel, are nine loud speakers which broadcast the voices previously recorded onto microchips.

But the work that caught my attention was his thesis for the “Masters of Fine Arts” at Columbia University. Return Policy Project explored to what extent we control or are controlled by the objects we buy.

He bought consumer goods, altered their function without modifying their appearance, and returned them to the market.

To make sure the unsuspecting user would adapt him-/herself to the altered object, the product had to be part of his/her life for a long period of time.

Using technology, such as tracking devices, voice recognition, sensor based automation, micro-controller computers or surveillance equipment, he built an interactive relationship between the product and its user.

For instance, he bugged an electronic alarm clock which advanced some 5 or 6 seconds. The buyer was gaining a few seconds every day without even knowing it. Another alarm clock would unexpectedly emit the sounds of a couple making love.

By offering a product with a modified function, the artist wanted to challenge the buyer to think about the purchase. The user either adopted the new function of the object, or returned it to the store (if he/she realized the modification within the 30-day return policy limit). If the product was returned, it circulated once again in the market and influenced someone else’s life.

Read about Charveriat’s other projects in networked_performance and rhyzome.
In ciberpais.