FRANÇOIS BUCHER | CONTACT
This exhibition reads like a science fiction novel, which, like any, is based on a previous one that exists in the past or in the future. In a plausible future that plucks the strings of the present, or in an imagined past, as every past always is, tangled in the words that we repeat, unaware of their origin, in the language that constantly “speaks us.”
Inverted words written on light tubes, and a reflection pool. Intrinsic, immanent order that can only be discovered through self-knowledge. Logos: what exists in the irreducible event of vision.
Ineffable order that can only be perceived as incorporation; Logos, the order of the son/daughter; a re ection that embodies the Father/Mother matrix; consciousness of the everything in the everything. Order that can only be read by he/she who has been initiated in the greater art of reading the world as a re ection of something that doesn’t exist in any space whatsoever, other than in its reflection; allegory, myth of the cave of the mystic Plato.
François Bucher
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Anisotropía #8 - Imagen y semejanza, 2018
Contact. Cosmic Background Noise Explorer
Polarizing filter, acrylic, PT (polyethylene terephthalate), led light panel.
35 x 35 x 35 cm
The exhibition Contact, Cosmic Background Noise Explorer exists on a threshold: in the instant and on the poetic coordinates where the waves crash on the beach of PensacolaI. In the intersection between the disembodied and the embodied. In the tearing down of the veil of consensus reality where we live disoriented; inhabitants of a language where the organ of contact is in a state of atrophy.
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
A celestial event, no words, they should have sent a poet, 2017
Contact - Cosmic Background Noise Explorer
Solarization (blueprint).
66 x 76 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
A celestial event, no words, they should have sent a poet, 2017
Contact - Cosmic Background Noise Explorer
Solarization (blueprint).
21 x 30 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
A celestial event, no words, they should have sent a poet, 2017
Contact - Cosmic Background Noise Explorer
Solarization (blueprint).
21 x 30 cm
Pensé en un Laberinto, 2017. Stencil, iron oxides tracer. Variable sizes. joségarcía, mx, 2019
“…I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars.”
A phrase by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) from his short story The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), which expresses—as if it were a Russian doll or Matryoshka—the nature of the story’s plot, where each event contains the key to another event, ad infinitum.
François Bucher
This is is a wall piece made from a scientific image, extracted from an academic journal. The image graphically represents the way in which radio astronomy works, how it reads the phenomenon of anisotropy or polarization in cosmic background noise in order to then translate it into an “image of time, from the instants that followed the Big Bang until now.
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Anisotropía #7. Big Bang , 2019
Contact - Cosmic Background Noise Explorer
Polarizing filter, acrylic, PET, light panel
60 x 120 x 10 cm
“… when we trace back the origin of the inevitable idea where we landed, we become aware that many avenues did indeed take us there simultaneously. e concept of polarization, that I am just starting to work on, is a case in point. It comes from a dream where the name L.P. Rosen is signaled to me by an index finder on a book, and later from the discovery that a person by that name is one of the collaborators in multiple essays on radio astronomy. It also comes from a concept of the Yanomami indians, where the extraction of fossil fuels from the ground is tantamount to invoking spirits from the past: the DNA from a distant, buried origin of Mother Earth. It comes from a perceptual experience drawn from living in constant relationship with noise, through which the experience ofapophenia is activated—which entails reading the world as an in nite code, or capturing weak signals from the universe to scan their meanings. It also comes from a child’s fascination with the rainbow e ect of gasoline on water; or from a navigation technique used both by the Vikings and by beetles; or from Carl Sagan’s novel Contact and its multiple clues about the moment when cutting-edge developments in the science of radio astronomy would turn cosmology into a precision science. It also comes from a desire to reach the ground zero of perception… part of the curriculum I have gone through with Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum in Mexico or with the Taitas (shamans) of the lower Putumayo region of Colombia. is University sets forth a question about how images and objects are formed in our consciousness.
All avenues were leading to the same place”.
François Bucher
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Anisotropía #4 – Pi 8888, 2019
Contact - Cosmic Background Noise Explorer
Polarizing filter, acrylic, PET, light panel
60 x 60 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Anisotropía #6, L.P. Rosen, 2019
Contact - Cosmic Background Noise Explorer
Polarizing filter, acrylic, PET, light panel
60 x 60 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Anisotropía #7 - Consensus Reality is a Serotonin Hallucination, 2019
Contact - Cosmic Background Noise Explorer
Polarizing filter, acrylic, PET, light panel
60 x 60 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Cosmic Background Noise Explorer , 2017
Contact - Cosmic Background Noise Explorer
Shells, steel wire,archival pigment print on cotton paper.
53 x 70 cm. 19 x 27 x 7,48 cm diadem
Radio telescopes “listen” to background noise and in so doing they also dis- cover thenoise of time. e portrait of the entire universe shown here is a portrait of noise. However, that noise only makes sense to the cosmic background noise explorer. What we see in the image is, again, the product of cutting- edge radio astronomy using anisotropy and/ or polarization in order to discover the history and the identity of waves, their origin and direction. What is interesting about this image is that we are not seeing small dots of colored stars against a spatial backdrop.
The sections of dots are actually spacetime moving as a wave (galaxy clusters) atop what we currently refer to as dark matter. In other words, everything we refer to as real is now a wave of this ocean, and the seabed where the waves roll, is located in a place that we cannot (yet) fathom.
As a complementary piece to the image of cosmic noise, there is a pair of seashell earphones. e traveler initiated in the art of rowing amidst waves of noise does not actually move; it is through the noise that they are able to connect and reduce all distances and times to zero. They make contact with the entrails (not mere trails) of the universe, which have the same proportions as the labyrinth of their inner ear, the golden ratio, Phi.
François Bucher
Plausible contact. The universe according to José Simón, 2019 Video HDV
The Maloca (ceremonial house) as inverted radio antenna, 2019. Stainless steel, 300 cm x 150 cm. Patricia Ready, Chile, 2019
The maloca—a ceremonial building of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon—is a holographic cipher of the celestial dome. What takes place within the boundaries of this re ection of the sky is a paradoxical circumscription of the eternal. It is a sort of trace of a time beyond time, and a site for a communion with the beginning of everything. Which is why it is there where origin myths play as in nite narration, through dances, through patterns, through the echoed chant of an invisible order.
The fractal dome of the sky—as an inverted radio astronomy antenna—emulates a ritual space, one where architecture is not solely a “building enclosing space,” but an abstract structure that opens up the suggestion of the everything that ts in any and all of its parts. The building as a hologram, expressing the calendrical, performing the dimension of time, opening—like a giant lung—before contracting once more, like a wave that expands from its origin to infinitude. The dome is also a literal expression of the passage between dimensions. It expresses the ascension from the second to the third dimension, through the form of a classic fractal that begins from the one and goes on an incessant search of everything; it expresses, in two words, the inter-dimensional passage.
François Bucher
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Cosmic Background Noise Explorer, 2019
Black and white digital print.
27 x 35 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Cosmic Background Noise Explorer, 2019
Black and white digital print.
27 x 35 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Cosmic Background Noise Explorer, 2019
Black and white digital print.
27 x 35 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Que muera conmigo el misterio que está escrito en los tigres, 2016
Gelatine silverprint remastered negative
40 x 60 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Que muera conmigo el misterio que está escrito en los tigres, 2016
Gelatine silverprint remastered negative
30 x 48 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Que muera conmigo el misterio que está escrito en los tigres, 2016
Gelatine silverprint remastered negative
49 x 35 cm
FRANÇOIS BUCHER
Cosmic Background Noise Explorer, 2017
Contact - Cosmic Background Noise Explorer
3D print
30 x 50 x 20 cm
The deer horns tattooed with the Milky Way are a simple metaphor of contact. The word Anthropocene has yet to be mentioned in relation to this project; however, there is a connection with the vision that underlies this term, which is able to fracture the seemingly eternal opposition between the cultural and the natural.
The Sami people, who inhabit the northern regions of the planet, were nomads throughout their entire history, and their technique of contact was to be guided by other beings that had more elaborate antennae than theirs. These sentient beings possess what biologists in recent years have come to call “culture,” following new evidence that contradicts everything we thought we understood at the time of our ill-founded superiority complex. Following the logic of year-long deer migration patterns, the diagram of the herd’s movements always drew a real and invisible mandala on the ground. Everything had intrinsic meaning, as everything was in contact with the most basic elements of the Earth and its movements in the universe.
François Bucher
ARCO E-XHIBITIONS, 3D EXPERIENCE, April 2021
Contact - Cosmic Background Noise Explorer. François Bucher