Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion explore how visual forms on the Internet shape our imaginations, behaviors, and relationships. Through video, installation, and net art, they work with images as spaces of projection, circulation, and fiction, where the connections between intimacy, desire, merchandise, and technology are recreated. By experimenting with popular or mainstream aesthetics, they produce works that are simultaneously embodied and critical, and in which narrative power coexists with the exposure of its own mechanisms.

s3lf.tech is the first part of a series developed following the artists’ residency at Villa Kujoyama in Japan in 2025, and features video installations, objects, and online extensions.

Central to the exhibition is the figure of Grim3s, loosely inspired by the world of pop star Grimes, who personifies several contradictions inherent in contemporary digital cultures: the promise of empowerment, techno-utopian fantasies, the monetisation of intimacy, and often ambiguous ideological shifts. The project is based in particular on www.elf.tech, a tool created by the singer that allows any voice to be converted into hers, and whose logic is extended here by Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion into a fictional scenario of self-multiplication. Grim3s attempts to emerge as a virtual idol within a saturated ecosystem, thanks to a technology that amplifies presence to a dizzying, dissociative, and exhaustive degree. Gravitating around her are other works that explore what it means to identify with an image, to inhabit a character, or to become attached to a virtual presence —technical objects, effigies, avatars, and fictional bodies that interact within a deliberately unstable ensemble, where no single form definitively defines its meaning.

Taking VTubing (a streaming practice in which users represent themselves via an avatar controlled in real time), fan fiction, customization cultures, and BJD (1) communities as their starting point, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion explore different modes of existence. They are interested in these intermediate forms of presence —somewhere between alter ego, character, synthetic idol, and technical double— which do not simply superimpose themselves onto a preexisting identity but instead act back upon it, shifting and reshaping it. The title s3lf.tech thus freely echoes the idea of “techniques of the self”, transposed here to digital environments, their interfaces, objects, fictions, and modes of incarnations.

s3lf.tech creates a world that is both seductive and unsettling, where the boundaries between authenticity, fiction, and reproduction are becoming increasingly blurred. The videos speak directly to viewers, employing shifts that disrupt both the perspectives and the status of the people involved. In this way, the project examines how digital environments affect identities, desires, and relationships —as well as belief itself, at a time when images multiply, become distorted, and acquire a form of autonomy online. Finally, the project extends beyond the exhibition space through songs, documents, broadcasts, and various elements published online, notably on the website www.s3lf.tech, which extend fiction into reality and blur the boundaries between them.

A second part, also resulting from the residency at Villa Kujoyama, will unfold in parallel at the Zoo centre for contemporary art in Nantes, in a more contemplative form, centered on a digital sanctuary conceived as a space for memory, connection, and collaboration.

(1) Ball-Jointed Doll: a doll with articulated joints. The term “BJD” specifically refers to modern Asian dolls made of resin. They are particularly popular in Japan, South Korea, and China.