The internet doesn’t lie, but we do, and Hoël Duret is doing it on purpose.

With the restrictions and apprehensions of Covid-19 hovering over many of us, I was unable to make an in-person visit to Hoël Duret’s exhibition ‘low’ at Villa Merkel. So instead, like most of us over the past nine months or so, I replaced the physical experience with a virtual one, and settled into viewing Duret’s latest single-channel video work Drop Out (2020) on my laptop.

Within seconds of clicking on the Vimeo link, the words ‘Internet doesn’t lie’, a quote attributed to a U.S. President named David S. Miller, appears on my screen. As it receded, a hazy and orangey view of what I assumed to be a lone wind turbine emerges. Accompanied by a melancholic score, this somewhat soothing visual is quickly disrupted by the superimposition of seven large, bold red letters across the screen, spelling out the title of the work, as well as a smaller declaration telling me that what I was about to see would be ‘a supra-natural neuro-electric journey’.

And off we went. The journey began with a brief sequence, mere seconds, of flashing lights. This was followed by a scrolling French text on a black screen, with the English subtitles diligently materialized beneath. As one would do in such a situation, I tried to read the text/translation. But my efforts were doomed to fail. The words, the sentences, moved unusually fast. My eyes tried their best to adjust to what was happening in front of me, but it was impossible to make sense of the text, any of it. And just to complicate matters further, the French text itself was obfuscated by an image of a moth resting atop. My experience of watching the remaining twenty-two or so minutes of Drop Out could, to a large extent, be described as playing a game of cognitive roulette. Shots of tropical/sub-tropical landscapes were overlaid with animated animals — a world in which an owl, an eagle, a lion and a bear conversed in (and switched freely between) French and English. Digitally created black blocks, at times semi-translucent, kept rotating and floating above and across the landscapes. The melancholic soundtrack, dripping with a mystic yet sensual quality, and in my opinion, reminiscent of scores in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016) and Wong Kar-Wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990), gave way to an electric sound that morphed into something vaguely religious, and then changed back again before returning to a sensual melancholy. Snippets of an interview with two New Zealanders, one man and one woman, in a blank white space were dotted between the animated animals, the floating black blocks, scrolling texts as well as the saturated images of natural and built landscapes. The interviewees appeared to speak philosophically about the earth, ecology, technology and our relationships with these systems. However, it was apparent that only fragments of this conversation were included and no context was offered, which meant it was rather challenging to piece together their thoughts or reasoning. Truth be told, during the time I spent with Drop Out, all my capacity to receive information was playing catch-up with the appealing, layered, and borderline hypnotic imagery. I was trying my best to follow and decipher waves of the visual and the sensory, albeit deliberate, chaos in front of my eyes.

As an artist, Duret is often characterized as a kind of storyteller. So, is he a visual artist masquerading as a storyteller? Or is it the other way round? And does it matter? Either way, it’s clear that he likes to share his stories with us. According to his own account, his works and projects thus far have all begun with the process of developing a fictional story. He does this in ways that are multidisciplinary, spanning installation, video, performance, sculpture, object and painting. Regardless of their medium or mode, each is conceived like a film script, with plots, scenes, characters and settings, illustrating some form of narrative arc. For instance, his solo exhibition ‘Too Dumb to Fail’ in 2018 at Galerie Edouard Manet Contemporary Art Center in the Parisian suburb Gennevilliers was a highly controlled environment that mimicked the cabins of a cruise ship. Comprising a series of videos, paintings and sculptures, the gallery was turned into a film or theatrical set as if it had been dreamed up by a surrealist. Showered under an artificial hue of electric blue, all components in this set/exhibition were meant to be apparatuses in Duret’s quest to devise the strange tale of a character, Harvey the journalist, and his plans to derail the original course of the cruise liner. The space was divided with floor-to-ceiling curtains to create a collection of compartments/cabins. And within these smaller spaces were glass and metal sculptural objects, and draped canvases that resembled common household items, such as towels racks, wall lamps and hand towels. Adding to the scene, videos featuring a number of highly stylized supporting characters, including a bartender, a cruise captain, holiday-makers and a housekeeping maid, were installed across the gallery. These characters, together with the inanimate objects and the immersive environment, served as both actors and observers, taking us through this fictional labyrinth of Harvey’s stories.

It is obvious that any clues or information about Harvey and his plans in ‘Too Dumb to Fail’ were deliberately fragmented, both spatially and narratively. Yet, all of its elements, from the macro to the micro, were hints and gestures that pointed towards the outcome of a possible scenario, however non-linear or disjointed that scenario might have been. Whereas in Drop Out, Duret seems to have moved even further away from the conventions of storytelling. Narrative threads beneath this single-channel work’s mesmerizing visuals are intentionally disrupted, broken and misrepresented, actively preventing the establishment of any cohesive structure. This tactic to mislead and misinform starts from the very beginning. The quote ‘internet doesn’t lie’ by a U.S. President David S. Miller is perhaps just a humorous and ironic nod, but as far as I can tell, there has never been a president of that name in the history of America. To the best of my knowledge, the nearest and likeliest candidate I could come up with was an American software developer of the same name. Though it would be difficult for me to pinpoint if he ever uttered those exact words publicly. And as an (opening) statement in and of itself, it is certainly debatable, if not entirely inaccurate.

On 8 March, 2000 during the last year of his presidency, one real U.S. President, Bill Clinton, famously wished the Chinese government good luck in trying to crack down on the internet and all its associated potential of free speech¹ , saying ‘That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall’² . Beyond the particular context of the Chinese authority’s digital control, this sentiment also alluded to the greater sense of buoyancy at the time of the internet’s potentially utopian-like power to usher us into a new, freer and more equal society. It was a widespread belief then. Needless to say, this kind of optimism from twenty years ago now seems not just dated, but rather naïve and misjudged. The fact is, as I write this text, we are knee-deep in the aftermath of the recent U.S. presidential election, which took place merely a fortnight ago. All of its subsequent legal, moral and ethical entanglements have been consuming and confusing, to say the least. In many parts of the world, we are also still tiptoeing around the cliff edge of a surging pandemic. News and information related to these major global events, as well as something as personal and intimate as a friend’s birthday, are now largely shared and spread using our internet connections via social media. Even though tougher governmental oversights and corporate liabilities are being discussed, we have unfortunately already become too familiar with phrases such as ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’. Virtual or not, we are witnessing agents from different corners of our society, from private individuals to elected officials, utilizing the vast reach of the internet to actively distort the fabrics of our shared understandings of facts and truths. So, rather than firmly planting our feet in a freer and more equal era, the internet is bombarding us with chaotic realities from near and far: the rise of authoritarian regimes, threats of incurable diseases, the displacement of tens of thousands of people, mass deforestation, extreme weather conditions, and the unprecedented wildfire catastrophes, amongst many others.

Unsurprisingly, in a world where the dissemination of misinformation is the new normal, the simple thought of trusting one’s own eyes is becoming an increasingly perplexing notion. In a sense, the visual structure and flow of Drop Out, with all its purposefully jumbled, uncoordinated, misleading and hectic shuffles and collisions — between images, languages, the living and the animated, the real and the imagined, the invented and the fake — are essentially echoes and reflections of what has been happening across our tablets and screens on a daily basis over the last several years.

Duret’s ideas and script for this work, first conceived during his participation at a residency program in New Zealand early this year, also took into account the characteristics/localities of the country. This South Pacific island nation is reported and named by numerous media outlets as the ‘future’, where the rich and the famous are allegedly prepping their ‘safety bunkers’ in anticipation of our impending natural and manmade disasters. The mysterious-looking black blocks are Duret’s visual representations of these supposed bunkers. Yet, clues that could yield a specific narrative direction such as this are subtle and often unattainable at first glance. On a visual and sensorial level, ‘a supra-natural neuro-electric journey’ it declares itself to be is perhaps one of the few truths he has slipped in to prepare and guide us. But unlike his previous works and projects, Drop Out leaves no discernable trail of crumbs for us to put together a potential arc of a tale. Instead, underneath its alluring and evocative, and at times almost psychedelic façade, lurks a series of impressions that implies the looming of an apocalyptic reality, one that is likely to be connected to our growing climate catastrophes.

Regardless of whether or not Duret has reaffirmed his trait as a visual artist bordering on storyteller with Drop Out, I can be certain that he is not the straight-forward kind. It’s true that the internet itself cannot lie, at least not yet as far as I understand, but us humans controlling it do. Evidently, we use it as a carrier to spread untruths or alternative facts. And just like a mirror of these troubling times we live in, Duret is happily lying and misleading us here. The major difference is, he has always been transparent about his intents, from his (false) opening statement, the illegible texts and the talking animated animals right to the end. In doing so, he has constructed a window where aspects of our reality, the earth we share, and the destructions we have caused, are in fact within reach beyond the trust of what we see.