LES INCUBATEURS
An exhibition of David Tomas
Performance on Saturday, November 7
The exhibition runs from October 15 to November 15, 1998

Early commentators on photography present us with an understandable but impossible paradox: Imagine that the photograph is an automatic, indeed, an automated kind of drawing. Of course, these commentators were simply clothing the unknown in the language of the known through the medium of metaphor. But the consequences of this analogy were potentially far-reaching. For not only was the unknown cast in terms of the known, but the known was also automatically recast in the context of the unknown and in terms of its new possibilities.
Already in 1839, if not earlier, photography is a hybrid medium. Its apparatus and its automated procedures nurtured a transhuman alter ego in the name of an expanded definition of the human body. This imperceptible alter ego has no name and, now, perhaps bears only a distant relationship to its model: an isolated circuit that links an eye, a hand, and a drawing instrument in the context of an emergent, embryonic idea.

The works in this exhibition explore the irreconciliable and the impossible difference within photography and the idea that, like photography, all media are Incubators.

David Tomas

For the past few years the artist has questioned technology, the human body, and the epistemology of images and their imaging systems through the practice of drawing. If this medium has been chosen to investigate these matters, it is because it appears to be, for David Tomas, the most direct and flexible of mediums to explore the advance nature of technology. As for photography, its process of amplification and magnification projects the drawings and their contents into a space in-between media.

The Incubator is a forty five minute performed installation. The work is conceived as a kind laboratory instrument for the investigation of alternative cultural and technological models for the extension and transformation of human identities and their consciousnesses.

The Incubator is the first performance to be presented by David Tomas in Montréal since 1986.

David Tomas was born in 1950 in Montréal. He is an artist and an anthropologist. He graduated in art from Concordia University in 1975 and received a PhD in anthropology from McGill University in 1988. Interested in interdisciplinarity, he has also done research in the fields of photography, the history of science and technology. His work has been exhibited in North America, Europe and the Middle East. In addition to the practice of performance (This is What you Want, This is What you Get; Lecture to an Academy: After Franz Kafka), he is also the author of Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings (Westview Press, 1996) and has contributed to Electronic Culture (Aperture, 1996), The Cyborg Handbook (Routledge, 1995), Visualizing Theory (Routledge, 1994). Between 1994 and 1997 he was invited to teach in American and European universities.