MANIFESTO / 1995
01 / FULL MANIFESTO / PRESS KIT
“It is punk, rock, techno, Dada. Everything and its opposite. The rule is that there are no rules.”
HISTORICAL PRECURSORS
What Marisa Olson and Gene McHugh theorised in 2008–2010, Systaime had been practising since 1999: desacralising the work, viral distribution, and the aesthetics of the digital vernacular.
The deliberate use of the bug predates Rosa Menkman’s formalisation of the movement (2010) by more than a decade.
THE FOUNDING PRINCIPLE
Founded in 1995, French Trash Touch was the first French artistic movement to theorise the aesthetics of bugs, glitches, and the digital vernacular — more than a decade before the art world named these practices.
Web-based, raw, digital, low-tech, experimental, instinctive, and interactive creation. The complete desacralisation of the artwork.
“There is no difference between a painter spending hours on a canvas and an artist spending hours creating a GIF.”
NO RULES / SIX SIGNALS
The technical accident stops being an error: it becomes material, rhythm, and signature.
Reappropriation, collision, quotation, and editing against the supposed purity of the image.
VHS, compression, pixels, and ordinary tools take the Web out of the Web and make it shareable.
The work exists through its circulation, copying, détournement, and networked audiences.
Popular formats, web culture, and direct humour overturn the hierarchy of fine art.
Raw, experimental, interactive creation: working fast to catch the living flow of the present.
ARCHIVE / COLLISION / NETWORK
No technological nostalgia: a living method for hacking the clean image, contaminating dominant formats, and putting the network back at the centre of the work.
PRECURSORS / CONTINUITIES
From Dada to Nam June Paik, from Fred Forest to glitch practices, Systaime belongs to a lineage that deconstructs media to reveal their political and sensory effects. French Trash Touch is not a fixed style: it is a method for remaining critical at the heart of technology.
WEB / RAW / DIGITAL / LOW-TECH / EXPERIMENTAL / INSTINCTIVE / INTERACTIVE
