New Film Pits Encyclopedias Against The Internet

French artist Camille Henrot's encyclopedic video Gross Fatigue begins with a computer cursor double clicking on a Final Cut file titled "The History of the Universe". The art film then overwhelms the viewer with a rhythmic assault of videos layered on top of each other, browsers on top of more browsers, referencing Wikipedia articles, animal videos, and original footage from inside the Smithsonian Institute, where there seems to be an infinite amount of drawers filled with dead specimens of pirañas and flamingos. The video's quick cuts, punctuated by its hip-hop soundtrack, are paired with a Foucauldian critique of how we order knowledge and information, especially in the digital age.

I watched Gross Fatigue this month in Toronto where it stood out as the only art film/video installation in the Toronto International Film Festival's program, and included narrative features helmed by the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal and James Franco. The video was also distinguished this year at the Venice Biennial, winning Henrot a Silver Lion for best young promising artist. It's still playing in Venice at Il Palazzo Enciclopedico until the end of November.

Recently we were able to speak with Henrot about the making of Gross Fatigue, as well as her creative process.

The Creators Project: How did the project come to be? 

Camille Henrot: In 2011, I was nominated to apply to the Smithsonian research fellowship. So I had to propose a project to research and I spent a lot of time on the Smithsonian web site to elaborate my research project. I was really getting lost in a lot of different directions, so I decided to build research that wouldn't be so hyper-specific. I was interested in how this artistic approach is related to building connections between things in order to achieve a complete image that embodies all the aspects of the universe and life. And so this was my research project, an exploration of the different strategies and different images used by African, Indian, European, American, and Native American cultures to explain all of the knowledge of the universe. And my goal was to form it into one singular object.

How did you develop the soundtrack?

Henrot: The voiceover was made up of fragments of different oral stories that I collected at the Smithsonian and on wikipedia. I selected different sentences that I liked, like "the earth rose like a mountain." Then, I started a conversation about building a mash-up of the history of the universe with a poet whose name is Jakob Bomberg. Together we worked on that text with all these different sentences. It was very interesting to try to structure it. Obviously all these creation myths have very different stories. It was a real challenge to fabricate one single story out of them. Basically, I had an idea that first there is all this history of the universe stuff, and then there is the creation of god, and then there is the god that creates the planets and the earth, and then the oxygen and the animals, the plants, and man and knowledge, and then loneliness and solitude and fatigue and death. This was the structure of our oral story. And then, I wanted a spoken word artist to perform it. I worked with Joakim Bouaziz who is a music producer and musician. He was super interested by the project. We worked together on it. The hip hop beat is very minimal like in Pharrell Williams's "Drop It Like It's Hot."

Do you think there is ever a danger in the way we order the universe with these systems and taxonomies, that we can think of them as reflection of the universe instead of merely social constructs?

Henrot: In my film, it's not only Western taxonomy approach to building knowledge. It's also mythologic strategies to represent the history of the universe. The voice over is a mashup of all these different oral histories of the universe. What I was interested in was to examine how these different strategies oppose each other and sometimes borrow from each other. And what I found interesting was to find a way to have so many different approaches to tell the history of the universe in one singular work. There's a universal passion to tell the history but a diversity of strategies.

Because I was at the Smithsonian and I am French, I was obviously interested in critiquing the Cartesian construction of knowledge. The Smithsonian is very much built up on everything Foucault describes in The Order of Things. For example, the Natural History Museum is the biggest museum of the world in terms of number of objects. When I visited it, what really struck me is the size of the collection of fish and of birds. I was asking to see one specific item of bird and they would open the drawer and I realized, not only was there one drawer with seven flamingos, but there were 20 drawers with seven flamingos in it. There was this kind of craziness of multiplication. And you really wonder, where does that end?

Henrot: And, there was this moment where they would show me a thing, and the thing would be flattened in the drawer. And that's the moment when I started thinking about the flattening of the world that the ordering of things is performing. And for me, this whole representation of the world into very flat sheets, it is very connected to the Internet. That's the moment that I decided that there was a complete continuity in the way the computer has been designed in terms of functionality–you know, the windows–and the way that objects in collections and museums are organized.

At the museum, I was also able to research intertexts, intermedia, and all the different lectures that were performed at universities around the very beginning of computing and the idea of the personal computer. And reading these texts, I understood any kind of attempt to build up the global image of the universe is like a sort of survival instinct, connected to an impetus to escape death–like in Noah's Ark. All global strategies are connected to that. So I was interested to see the personal computer as we know see it is so much connected to loneliness.

What was it like watching these specialists at the Smithsonian interact with these specimens?

Henrot: It was sometimes a very violent image, in a way. I remember someone telling me that the Smithsonian has 97% of the fish we know exist. It's really impressive to see the fish dead in the alcohol, but the birds–maybe it's just because the bird is a symbol of movement and life–was emotionally very striking. I was very interested in the man responsible for the collection of birds because he had a very soft and almost in-love way of touching these birds. You could tell they were not dead to him. The way he touches them and the way he looks at them is very strong. It makes you consider the understanding of what is dead and what is alive. There's so much ambivalence and ambiguity in these images. They are both beautiful and morbid, and you oscillate constantly between a feeling of disagreement and fascination.

There is an ambivalence in the ecological point of view in this collection, since having the specimen allows the Smithsonian to understand how it functions and how to protect them. But there is this spirit of preservation, and at the time time, people killed these animals to be specimens. (Not all of them but most of the animals are killed to be brought back to the museum.) This preservation process, which needs to go through the step of killing, is also dangerous because it goes with the idea that man is as powerful as nature and we don't care as much about the disappearance of creatures. It is a little bit like it's keeping us from not seeing what we are losing. We are never going to have it back. Whatever collection of specimens we have, it's never going to be possible to recreate the white tiger.