[ a n y m a ] Michael Egger at Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg

Under the pseudonym [ a n y m a ], the artist Michael Egger has been creating instruments and other audiovisual installations at the frontier between art and technology for 25 years. In Friart, he is opening the doors of his prolific universe to us by rearranging some of his projects in an extensive immersive environment. His creations are sometimes designed as instruments to be used in live performance. Here they have been assembled as the different parts of a big electronic machine on the point of veering out of control.

Feedback Follies is a world saturated by wires, screens, potentiometers and special effects. Various devices send out electronic signals that are transformed into unstable visual forms on screen. The presence of exhibition visitors impacts on its workings but it is impossible to tell what has an effect on what. For Egger, a multimedia artist who works with opensource protocols, research and exploration count as much, if not more, as the finished product. Each component is thus susceptible to being reworked, modified and updated, until eventually it becomes obsolete.

Michael Egger makes most of the components for his prototypes himself, right down to the detail of the electronic circuits. Developed in collaboration with Flo Kaufmann and Max Egger, the Synkie is a monumental video image synthesizer of video images that the artist has been working on for 15 years, a long-term project evoking the excessiveness of creative folly. In a small room at the back of the exhibition space, the artist has chosen to reveal some of the inner workings of the instrument. Sections of transparent film used to print electronic circuits have been placed on a light box alongside a stop bath and a small dark room ( Ätz- box, mobile engraving kit, 2018/2024 ). At the other end of the work, photographic shots ( Screenshots I-VI, 2021 ) of the video screen stand as documents the fugitive images the Synkie pulls out of the random chaos of the signal.

The exhibition is chock full of devices for visitors to interact with, along with other illusions and artifices.

Using a process of inversion, the artist plays about with productions from various media. In Superbeam 2000 ( 2017 ), a video projector is incorporated into a false Super 8 film projector. This wooden copy, made by the artist, gives the illusion of being an industrially produced object. This counter-intuitive approach reveals a rebelliousness that takes a DIY tinker’s approach to current production methods, very much part of a bootleg, hacker material culture. A-NSM-FSC-1.15 ( 2022 ), [ a n y m a ] Nonsensical Supermassive Fake Supercomputer, a supercomputer crafted using what is supposedly the most up-to-date tech. Entirely fake, it becomes part of the decor, full of historical and cinematographic references that set our fantasies to work.

A nod to the canonisation of technology and the way it (dis)possesses our collective imaginary, [ a n y m a ] is also an incitement to get our hands dirty and reappropriate this said tech, above and beyond the predominant themes of novelty and innovation.