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Content:

Co-commissioned by ZERO1 Biennial and the 7th Seoul International Media Art Biennale (Media City Seoul 2012) By Maurice Benayoun (aka MoBen 莫奔)

Music and sound design by Jean-Baptiste Barrière

Software and engineering by Daniel Miller and Robin Gareus

In 1995, before the Internet was common and video chatting a daily routine, The Tunnel under the Atlantic by Maurice Benayoun invited participants in Montreal and Paris to communicate with one another after digging a virtual tunnel through cultural material.

Now, in 2012, the expanded interactive installation Tunnels around the World (2012) invites people from different cultures to use their bodies and dig virtual tunnels based on their own interests for art and culture. The School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong is connected not only to two biennials, in San Jose (ZERO1) and Seoul (MEDIACITY 2012, Museum of Art), but also to Montreal (SAT) and soon to New York City and France. The material to dig is made of images of arts, combining collections from the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the French Reunion des Musées Nationaux and archive images from each participating institution to telematically connect to live participants at the other end of the tunnel. The dynamic sound and music by Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Benayoun’s long-term collaborator, combine cultural mixing with individual physical and spiritual experience.

Tunnels is a continuously evolving project originating from innovative technologies like eGonomy “maieutic engine”, which dynamically displays the visual content according to the user’s natural serendipity. This technology is inspired by the original Tunnel under the Atlantic “Gadevu” that helped people find themselves (Gnothi Seauton) before finding each other.

Later, voice-recognition software (Nuance Communications, Inc.) will influence the emergence of the images using keywords caught from the diggers’ dialogue.

A bladeless fan creates the wind that spreads the White Cube’s fragrance, the perfume created by Maurice Benayoun to reflect “the essence of contemporary art”.

Tunnels should be understood as an opportunity to explore the cultural and emotional distance which, beyond the geographical distance, brings people together or drives them apart. The individual experience brings us closer to implicit desires that we are then able to share with the other. Tunnels of sense grow around the world, like a cultural virus contaminating individualities and promoting difference.