Colleen Becker
What do flying dogs, imaginary cities, plastic surgery and infant automata have in common? Nothing. Yet each are the subject of an audio-video composition by Pleix, the seven-member Parisian collective of musicians, video editors, graphic designers and 3-D artists, who, rather than present a unified "body of work," stress the heterogeneity of their sources and output. Ranging from comic books, cinema, art, toys, anime, television and everyday life, the pop cultural spectrum of their inspirational materials is broad, but the end result consistently achieves an "of the moment" quality. While Pleix’s music videos and short films are not always intended to sell product to mass audiences, they nonetheless all generate publicity via distribution over the internet, at film festivals, on DVDs and through exhibitions. And although some of their projects are conceived on a not-for-profit basis and with low or no budgets, Pleix also generates revenue by making commercials for clients like Pontiac, Siemens, Sony Ericsson and Adidas. After working for French directors Kuntzel and Deygas, the anonymous members of the group formed Pleix in 2001 as a means to develop their own ideas. With the attainment of ever-increasing artistic freedom as a goal, their challenge is to strike the right balance between their personal vision and the commercial work that funds its realization. The most recent film is Birds, created for French electronic musician Vitalic’s track "Poney Part 1," which was released just before OK Cowboy hit the racks in the States. Sometimes was recently on exhibit in "La volupté numérique" at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, and Pleix was included in "D-Day: Modern-Day Design" at the Centre Pompidou. With their wide array of prize-winning projects, resisting easy classification could be Pleix’s only trademark attribute.
In their films, Pleix embeds elements that potentially could be read on a subliminal level, but these are reliant on the viewer for their interpretation. While a readiness to establish dialogue with its audience is aligned with Pleix’s own open-ended attitude toward referencing, their disinterest in tendentious communication makes it easy for the viewer to project specific socio-political commentary where none is intended. The music video Sometimes for the eponymous Kid 606 track is a perfect example of this tendency. It starts as a view of an improbable city skyline with one gigantic building towering over all others and then closes in on this unlikely landmark as its glass curtain wall suddenly ruptures and liquefies. Massive construction components shatter into confetti or disintegrate as individual blocks and tiles, which collect in graceful clouds to float down uninhabited city streets, and morph into loose sculptural amalgams in the sky above. These collide and break into new configurations before regrouping to form the corner of some other structure. Street details include yellow cabs and a FedEx truck and, as one would expect given the presence of such urban American icons, commentaries on Sometimes have framed the film as an "elegy" or "monument" to the World Trade Center. Pleix itself makes no such claim, and the setting for the film is in fact no particular place. They shot hundreds of buildings throughout Paris, but some visual components were simply appropriated from the results of a Google internet search; for Pleix, the editing process is just as important as the sounds and images themselves. Constructed of disparate parts, the city environment operates as a hybrid, and ultimately generic, typology with just as much "authentic" character as the ready-made Computer Graphics (CG) shapes used as cladding for the buildings.
Like Sometimes, Simone is an early project that encompasses the accidental. Trapped inside of a SIMON game and compelled to physically respond to its manipulation in the form of alterations in light, color and music by Pleix’s in-house musician Bleip, a young woman becomes subsumed within the medium through which she is rendered. But while chance in Sometimes operates as a product of the film’s openness to interpretability, in Simone, the aleatory possibilities inherent in new media are emphasized and exploited. Demonstrating the group’s interest in exploring the "limits" and "fragility of the digital world," Simone takes as a motif the kinds of image-distorting artifacts–like visible horizontal lines, blockiness, and pixilation–that the professional application of sophisticated technologies generally elides. As the girl’s movements gain speed towards the film’s completion, its image quality, and along with it, the integrity of the of the girl’s physicality, begins to break down to the extent that the medium itself seems to be causing her bodily pain.
Simone is not a unique example of Pleix’s capacity to interrelate oppositions such as the virtual and the somatic or the artificial and the "real." Formally, e-baby, with music scored for the film by Bleip, and Simone seem to have little in common, especially since e-baby’s story line is far more complicated. But there are a few key points of comparison: both films play with the point of interface between the illusion of embodiment and the technique through which it is realized, and each shows human emotion elicited through technological means. As e-baby begins, we see a screen with ordering information and the specs for a simulated infant encased in glass. We watch as it comes to life, and its "mother"–a pair of black gloves that enables haptic engagement with the baby–connects to the infant and stimulates it via a "Relation Remote System." Gloved hands play with the doll until the system’s bandwidth is compromised and the health of the baby is consequently endangered. After its revival and an extensive self-check, the system is once again operational until the relational session comes to a close. Pertaining to contemporary everyday life experiences such as text-messaging and email, Pleix’s futuristic fantasy alludes to the alienating effect mediated communication has on human relationships and questions the sincerity and depth of feeling achieved through this kind of interaction. With one eye focused on the future potentiality of artificial intelligence, Pleix also looks back to the twisted mannequins of twentieth-century German-born Surrealist Hans Bellmer and the automata of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann for its source material.
While these works and music videos like Pride’s Paranoia for Futureshock and Itsu for Plaid tell a story, other pieces are non-narrative compositions in which visual elements interact with music. Clicks, No, and More all feature Pleix’s Bleip, who recently released the E.P. Bleip +1. Combining shifting and changing abstract and representational forms with the ad-hoc intuitiveness of collage artists, these are more reminiscent of the kind of work made by VJs. However, Pleix films are neither created as an event nor screened in a live venue as are light and image performances by visuals-jockeys. With quickly interspersed phrases such as "More data," "More goals," "More hangovers," "More energy" and "More pressure" in More and "No space," "No intimacy," "No apologies," "No words" and "No music," in No, these nearly incidental details, like those of Sometimes, solicit a subjective response from the viewer. Although all of Pleix’s work relies on technological means for its production, human interaction remains a core component of its functionality and realization.
