Robin Meier and Ali Momeni – Solo Exhibition "The Common Beautiful Tragedy"

Text and images by Chen Chi-Hsiang. July 8 to October 2 at Palais de Tokyo. Robin Meier (born 1980) and Ali Momeni (born 1975) are two rare contemporary artists with backgrounds in music education. In today’s art world that emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches, they favor a distinctive form of technology-infused art, exploring the boundary between art and science, with a particular focus on the mutual influence between humans and machines, attempting to investigate various possibilities through new technological processes.

Beyond their musical and artistic training, what sets them apart is their preference for observing and manipulating the activities and behavioral attitudes of organisms around them, much like animal ecologists. They then establish these mechanical arrangements and perform the mutual influences between animals and machinery through sound.

In this solo exhibition titled "The Common Beautiful Tragedy," they kept many ants inside a transparent plastic box structure placed at the center. The upper and lower organizational structures featured different objects displayed in the six corners above: leaves, books, food plates, etc. Ants would climb according to the upper and lower structures to search for food, concentrating on these objects. Each object was equipped with a microscopic video camera, projecting the images onto another round table. Besides the central disc connecting to the front discs, transparent plastic tubes formed a circular path of the structure, linking four ant greenhouses and one transparent plastic box. People could closely observe the ecological and activity scenes of the ants, hearing the subtle sounds of their movements, resembling an ant theater.

They constructed a dramatic theater combining images, smells, textures, and sounds far more extraordinary than usual, presenting a choreography reacting to colors and tastes. The social structure of ants seems to metaphorize the situations and confusions under the current human super-information society, or how machinery directly influences human existence behaviors and attitudes, thereby shaping societal conditions.