With a Rhythmic Instinction to be Able to Travel Beyond Existing Forces of Life (2016) 10MINS 25SEC DCP 3D COLOUR, SOUND

Anywhen (2016) 17MINS 41SEC DCP COLOUR, SOUND

This film is an automaton, created using a series of approximately 400 drawings of fireflies produced by Philippe over a period of three years. The drawings are animated by an algorithm found within The Game of Life, a cellular automaton developed by British mathematician John Horton Conway. Each sequence of drawings is selected according to the particular algorithm at work and, through this process, the animation achieves a life of its own. The lifespan of each sequence is determined by the rules of the cellular automata and its survival depends upon the rules of chance.

Parreno’s most recent film, Anywhen was created for his Turbine Hall commission of the same name, which opened at the Tate Modern (Lon-don) on 4 October 2016. The film is a performance by actor and ven-triloquist Nina Conti who speaks a monologue, her mouth not moving. As Conti speaks we see images of a bioluminescent cephalopod mov-ing gracefully across the screen, almost dancing, and looking back at us as we watch the film.

Li Yan (2016) 15MINS 18SEC DCP COLOUR, SOUND

The Crowd (2015) 21MINS 10SEC DCP COLOUR, SOUND

Li Yan depicts a city suspended between day and night, in the liminal hour that is dusk or dawn. Descending through the clouds, the camera enters an uncannily vacant city. Then we see a young woman walking alone through a park. The amplified sound implies a sense of movement through a series of fixed shots. These sounds, along with small disturbances in the environment, hint at an unseen, alien presence. Shot on location in New York City, the film is a dream, or a series of memories, that incorporates images from several of Parreno’s earlier films: C.H.Z., Credits, and The Boy From Mars. Recalling another of Parreno’s New York films, the young woman playing Li Yan is the mother of the boy who features in the film InvisibleBoy.

The Crowd (2015) was shot inside the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory and later presented on the occasion of a solo show the artist held at the New York venue from 11 June – 2 August 2015. The building is considered an important monument of American engineering, and echoes the architecture of large European train stations built during the early 1900s.

Speaking words that Parreno has used before in texts, interviews, con-versations, entwined with fragments from James Joyce, Conti presents ideas of time and automata: “The mask is the first automaton”; “Eterni-ty in perpetuity.” She ends with a premonition: “There’s no way to stop the upcoming tragedy.”

The camera films 300 hundred New Yorkers, some of whom have been hypnotized. As they move through the space their attention seems to be drawn to the sound of a piano, and this is precisely the event that drives all these individuals to gather together around a more luminous area where hypothetically an invisible pianist is producing the melody. Shadows, bodies of smoke and clouds of suspended particles weave around images of bodies in movement, ethereal presences in the space. The entire scene seems to evoke the phantasmagoria, an ancient technique based on the illusionary interplay of light and smoke that was employed in nineteenth-century pre-cinema performances.The Crowd illustrates the relationships between presence and absence that are woven throughout Parreno’s oeuvre: on one hand, the presence of shade in the space seems to substitute that of the individuals – captured in an almost otherworldly experience – on the other the artist reflects on the viewer’s experience within an exhibition in which the confines between those who are observing and the object of their observation become increasingly evanescent.Speaking words that Parreno has used before in texts, interviews, conversations, entwined with fragments from James Joyce, Conti presents ideas of time and automata: “The mask is the first automaton”; “Eternity in perpetuity.” She ends with a premonition: “There’s no way to stop the upcoming tragedy.”

Marilyn (2012) 19MINS 49SECDCPCOLOUR, SOUND

The film conjures up the ghost of Marilyn Monroe through a phantasmagoric séance in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, where she lived in the 1950s. Taken from the point of view of the deceased Marilyn, the film reproduces her presence by means of three algorithms: the camera becomes her eyes, a computer reconstructs the prosody of her voice and a robot recreates her handwriting. The Hollywood icon is carnated in an image that is in fact an automaton, something resembling a human, and yet not quite real.

C.H.Z. (Continuously Habitable Zones) (2011) 13MINS 14SECDCPCOLOUR, SOUND

InvisibleBoy (2010) 5MINS 18SEC35MM, TRANSFERRED TO DCPCOLOUR, SOUND

C.H.Z. stands for “Continuously Habitable Zones,” an astrobiological term used for planets offering viable conditions for life to grow. Recent scientific studies have shown that life would be more likely to develop on a planet with two or more small suns (dwarf suns) rather than on a planet with one very bright sun. In such zones the saturated photosynthesis would produce black vegetation. For this film, Parreno collaborated with landscape architect Bas Smets to design the set, an extraterrestrial landscape near Porto, Portugal, that continues to grow to this day. Merging science and fiction, the landscape is practically void of light, presenting a disorientating black environment. The landscape is both alien and familiar - unclear as to whether this is a new inhospitable planet or the aftermath of some catastrophic event on Earth. Alongside the film, Parreno created a series of intricate, detailed ink drawings.

InvisibleBoy portrays the life of a Chinese immigrant child who lives in Chinatown in New York. The narrow streets and spaces along which the hectic activities of the local community unfold are populated with monstrous imaginary figures that embody the protagonist’s fears. Reality and fiction overlap; monsters weave their way slowly into the urban fabric, assuming the aspect of alien life forms. The figures are generated through scratches on the film, and seem to come to life in the photograms. The song ‘Singular Woman’, by Nicolas Becker and Agoria, accompanies the entire video. With this artwork,

Parreno attempts to give an image to people who are generically defined as ‘invisibles’, and who lay outside any legal classification. As the artist says, ‘InvisibleBoy is a contemporary superhero produced by today’s city.’

June 8, 1968 (2009) 7MINS 11SEC70MM, TRANSFERRED TO DCPCOLOUR, SOUND

The Writer (2007) 3MIN 58SECDVDCOLOUR, SOUND

A film which reenacts images taken by Magnum photographer Paul Fusco, of the train voyage that transported assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy’s corpse from New York to Washington D.C. on June 8, 1968. The film takes the point of view of the dead, a tracking shot moves through rural and urban American landscapes. People who have come to pay their respects line the tracks, staring as if in an immobile trance. These silent characters watch a moment in history pass by and form a community with the spectators of the film around this invisible body. The past comes back to haunt us in an image.

The Writer features an automaton built by Pierre Jacquet-Droz in the 18th century, a machine that some consider to be the oldest example of the computer. The automaton has an input device, which allowed it to be programmed with the sentence ‘What do you believe, your eyes or my words?’ The automaton holds a feather pen, dips it in an ink well, writes, follows what it writes with its eyes, all the while we hear the metallic noises of its internal mechanisms at work. It appears strangely human and robotic at the same time. This machine-marionette has no consciousness or infinite consciousness. The sentence is left unfinished.

Stories are Propaganda (2005) WITH RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA8MINS 40SEC16MM, TRANSFERRED TO BETACAMBLACK AND WHITE, SOUND

Briannnnn & Ferryyyyy (2004) WITH LIAM GILLICK30MINDVDCOLOUR, SOUND

Stories are Propaganda was created by Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija for the Guangzhou Biennial in China. The artists documented the new city under construction on the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou. A succession of fixed shots show black factory smoke, piles of trash, words written in the sand, and trees swaying in the wind. Flowing rapidly from general observations of the era to autobiographical details to self-reflection, poetic fragments unroll like snapshots: a Chinese magician making watches and clocks appear at night; a small albino rabbit floundering in a muddy puddle; a snowman made of mud; a shadow puppet silhouetted against the moon. Narrated by a child off-screen, the film creates a feeling of melancholy through its evocation of the end of the world’s ideologies. It is an inverted cinema made of scenes edited according to a temporal protocol.

Using the cat and mouse theme often found in cartoons, this animated film in ten episodes stars a cat and a mouse called Briannnnn and Ferryyyyy, in homage to the British singer. The two characters chase each other, hurt each other, die, and continue the fight in heaven. The credits at the end of each episode list quotations, ideas and the names of both imaginary and real people. The work reflects humorously on intellectual property rights, as well as on popular and artistic creation. The episodes were written by Gillick, drawn by Parreno and animated by a young New York-based artist, Ivan Orkney. The typography was originally designed by M/M (Paris).

The Boy from Mars (2003) 10MIN 39SEC35MM, TRANSFERRED TO DCPCOLOUR, DOLBY SR SOUND

Mont Analogue (2001) 30MINSBETACAMCOLOUR, SILENT

In 2001 Parreno was invited by his friend the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija to build a common space for The Land project in Chiang Mai, Thailand: a building that generates its own energy through a pulley system run by buffalo. Designed by architect François Roche, it was constructed solely in order to be filmed. Points of light appear then fly away silently; the film searches for the origin of these bursts of energy, then gets lost, becomes fascinated by reflections of the sun, takes in frames full of sky, then lingers on the buffalo tethered to this strange building. In the end the screen goes black and Devendra Banhart sings. It was the building that generated the electricity needed to make the film. This is the story of a film that produced a building, architecture that provided the scenario for a film and a film that produced a song. The film is one element of a two-headed mutant, one half of inseparable twins, reality and the image, who share the same body. Science fiction, or rather architecture fiction.

The film Mont Analogue is an encryption of the novel of the same name by René Daumal.Daumal’s text (published posthumously in 1952) has different references to philosophy and the history of religion and literature, and tells the story of a theory shared by a group of friends concerning the existence of a mountain - Mount Analogue – that equals the sum of all the mountains in the northern hemisphere put together. The expedition they set up confirms the existence of this mountain, as well as of a

mysterious community that lives in its foothills, but Daumal’s death prevents us from knowing the outcome of their hike to the top. This unfinished tale has inspired numerous artworks, including Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film La montaña sagrada (The Holy Mountain).

El Sueno de una Cosa (2001) 1MIN35MM, TRANSFERRED TO DCPCOLOUR, STEREO SOUND

Anywhere Out of the World (2000) 4MIN3D ANIMATION, TRANSFERRED TO DCPCOLOUR, SOUND

El sueno de una cosa means ‘the dream of a thing’. It lasts only a minute. The film was first shown as a commercial in pre-feature advertising in movie theatres throughout Sweden. It was filmed in Svalbard, a small Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle, an idyllic grove untouched by humans. The images are accompanied by Désert, music by Edgard Varèse. In the final scene, which acts as a packshot, the spectacular erupts from the natural as flowers spew forth from the ground, blossoming at an accelerated speed right before our eyes. The narrative structure is similar to a commercial, but this commercial sells nothing. The film encourages the spectator to imagine his/her own object of desire. Like a recurring dream, the viewing experience changes each time it reappears.

Anywhere Out of the World (2000) is part of No Ghost Just a Shell (1999-2003), a project born in collaboration with the artist Pierre Huyghe that explores the relationship between forms of producing, distributing and perceiving artworks. In 1999 Parreno and Huyghe bought the rights to a Japanese manga character they named “Annlee”. They lifted all copyrights from the character, asking other artists and

designers to create various artworks with Annlee as a protagonist. Parreno’s film is the first episode in this series of projects, and is characterized by a unique sequence in which Annlee presents herself as a girl without a past, and declares her existence as a product free of any copyright or market restrictions. Annlee’s voice was created digitally by the artist. Her presence has an ambiguous quality: she is a melancholy character, devoid of quality, deigned to remain a simulated reality. In addition to dealing with themes of copyright and authorship, the artwork reflects on the ways and circumstances that lead to the definition of an identity in the contemporary era.

Vicinato II (2000) WITH LIAM GILLICK, DOUGLAS GORDON, CARSTEN HÖLLER, PIERRE HUYGHE, RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA11MIN 30SEC35MM, TRANSFERRED TO BETACAM SPCOLOUR, DOLBY STEREO SOUND

Credits (1999) 6MIN 30SEC35MM, TRANSFERRED TO DVDCOLOUR, SOUND

This film is a sequel to Vicinato (1995). Four actors engage in a conversation written by six artist friends and collaborators. These four actors have often worked together and their longstanding relationship influences not only the script but the feeling of the film, which follows the characters while they negotiate their relationships with each other and the world. They drift aimlessly through the hills overlooking the French Riviera. As they converse, a fifth voice, an automaton, mechanically narrates the story. It speaks for the characters, defines the different points of view, repeats some of their lines and speaks the stage directions.

Credits is a collective memory, a shared image the represents the memories of a housing project that no longer exists. Based

on testimonials from former residents, administrators, and politicians, the film reconstructs a memory of the urban wasteland of Parreno’s childhood. The film is made of hazy recollections. Multi-coloured plastic bags hanging from bare tree branches are an evocation of the time when kids would hang plastic bags on the trees that, planted as part of a greening plan, prevented them from playing football. The bags blow in the wind and glow under the light of passing time – rain, twilight, then night. Streetlights and apartment blocks peek through the trees. A glimpse of suburbia. Within a fixed frame, the light wavers and electric guitar riffs come and go, played by Angus Young, the guitarist from AC/DC, an idol of Parreno’s in the late 1970s.

Ou (1996) 7MINSUPER 16MM, TRANSFERRED TO DIGITAL BETACAMCOLOUR, SOUND

Birthday Zoe 2004 (1996) 4MINVIDEO HI-8 AND VHS, TRANSFERRED TO DVDCOLOUR, SOUND

In a sequence lasting twenty seconds, a girl slowly pulls up her Mickey Mouse t-shirt. The rest of the film comprises the credits, which last more than six minutes. Ou, which means ‘or’ in French, attempts to trace a network of events, listing every participant from the most obvious (director, producer, make-up artist) to situations, encounters, quotes, friends, writers, and vague ideas that directly or indirectly brought this film into existence. Ou came about through a set of relations: a vast terrain of heterogeneous actants which collided to produce an image.

Birthday Zoe is a science-fiction home movie depicting a twelve-year-old girl’s birthday party set eight years in the future. The film is

a staged party inter-spliced with actual home movies. A sequence of shots of Zoe at various ages shows her at the same fireplace opening presents on Christmas mornings. The speed of the cuts intensifies, reaching a turbulent pitch before leaping into the future. Time has bifurcated. The twenty-year-old Zoe refuses to blow out her candles in spite of her mother’s warning that she will remain ‘trapped in this time frame here in Cincinnati’. Returning to the twelve-year-old protagonist, and the unstable periodicity of past birthdays, young Zoes at every age are unable to blow out their candles. In a sunlit yard, an uncut turquoise birthday cake sits on a table amidst the aftermath of a party. Zoe dissolves into an incandescent flash of light, which fades to a shot at dusk where the littered table is now lit by fireflies.

Vicinato (1995) WITH CARSTEN HÖLLER AND RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA 12MIN16MM, TRANSFERRED TO DIGITAL BETACAM BLACK AND WHITE, SOUND

Invited to participate in a group exhibition at the Guenzani studio in Milan, Parreno, Höller and Tiravanija decided to share an image instead of a space. In reference to their collaboration and the proximity of their thoughts, they called the film Vicinato, which means neighbourhood in Italian. They wrote a dialogue, which was translated into Italian. This script was then randomly and equally distributed between three Italian actors, who knew each other because they had previously worked together on the dubbing of Power Rangers. The film begins with a shot of a table on a rooftop with a view over the modern city of Milan. Voices are audible off screen. One by one, the camera reveals the men who are speaking. Three men in suits, intensely engaged in a conversation, sit around the table. They talk about love, art, language. The camera spins around in circles as they talk. Shot in a cinematic style evocative of Italian neorealist films of the 1940s and 1950s, the work is an attempt to create a dialogue in the form of a film.

While… (1995) 5MIN 30SECVIDEO HI-8, TRANSFERRED TO DCPCOLOUR, SOUND

La Nuit Des Heros (1994) 13MIN35MM, TRANSFERRED TO DCPCOLOUR, SOUND

While is an attempt to freeze time. At 5pm every day for three weeks the same news was broadcast on a public TV channel. The German newscaster from ARD (a joint organisation of Germany’s regional public-service broadcasters), Dagmar Berghoff, reads a text written by participants of a workshop held at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. All the information is true.

La Nuit Des Heros is a comedy, co-written with curator Nicolas Bourriaud. In the opening sequence we hear a voice-over: ‘We must recount the history of art in the same way as we comment on a football game’. The film stars an art historian, Dante, played by famous French impersonator Yves Lecoq. Dante lives in seclusion in an abandoned part of a Le Corbusier building in the suburbs of Saint-Etienne. He has removed himself from society to write the history of modern art, and amuses himself by making important figures from modernism, from Cézanne to Yves Klein, speak with the voices of French celebrities such as Jean-Paul Belmondo or Françoise Sagan. In one sequence, in the voice of Pope John Paul II, he tells his ‘disciples’, some old women who live in the same building, to pray that images will no longer torment them. While Dante rants about modern art, his neighbour, who he thinks is an angel, films random people, asking them, ‘Do you believe in images?’ One stranger replies: ‘We are so alone without images’.

Snaking (1992) WITH PIERRE JOSEPH3MIN 28SEC SUPER 8MM, TRANSFERRED TO DIGITAL BETACAMBLACK AND WHITE, SOUND

No More Reality, la manifestation (1991) 4MINBETACAM, TRANSFERRED TO DIGITAL BETACAMCOLOUR, SOUND

Snaking was made at the time of the Gulf War, when footage of American soldiers crawling in the desert was constantly shown on CNN. During a trip to New York at this time, the artist was struck by the number of people jogging or rollerblading in Central Park wearing protection helmets equipped with mirrors allowing 360˚ vision and bright, colour-coordinated jumpsuits. In response, Parreno and Joseph decided to invent a new ‘extreme sport’ called ‘snaking’. Snaking entails crawling on the ground, commando-style, wearing a neoprene suit wrapped around your legs. The film is a parody of commercial advertising for sporting gear, telling the viewer: ‘If you are tired of trekking, rafting, blading, jogging, try SNAKING!’ The stammering announcer struggles to deliver the slogan as snakers battle the terrain, dragging themselves along to music by Snakefinger, the guitarist from The Residents. Though it should only last 30 seconds, the commercial lasts three minutes. The film stutters.

No More Reality, la manifestation documents a performance that was the end result of a workshop organized by Parreno in a primary school in Nice. Children who are seven and eight years old march around a playground shouting “No more reality,” and waving banners printed with the same slogan. The work recalls other student protests, and gives voice to an era of disenchantment. The young protesters didn’t know what a demonstration was before they came together in the workshop to think about their demands. In the process of agreeing

on a slogan, they began to make another reality: Christmas in September, snow in Summer. Their slogan became a catch phrase: ‘NO MORE REALITY’. The kids wanted to shout it in English as an echo to the familiar tagline: ‘JUST DO IT’.

No More Reality, une vidéoconférence (1991) 38MINBETACAMCOLOUR, SOUND

Once Upon a Time … in City Bild (1990) WITH PIERRE JOSEPH 6MIN VIDEO HI-8, TRANSFERRED TO DCPCOLOUR, SOUND

No More Reality, une videoconference is a caricature of an art critic played by Parreno who speaks in incomprehensible verbiage in five different languages. A close-up shot shows the artist repeating the slogan “No more reality” while hitting his head and grimacing. The stuttering character is inspired by Ron Pearlman’s portrayal of the character Salvatore in the film The Name of the Rose (1980). He delivers a lecture about the relationship between art and power that is both comical and pathetic, but ultimately unintelligible. The film satirizes the hierarchical-cultural implications of specialized language. The message seems important, but most of the words remain lost in incomprehensible blather.

Once Upon a Time…In City Bild is a science-fictional tale of a futuristic society. A woman wearing a crown of aluminium foil encrusted with Smarties recounts a tale of a nomadic woman who comes upon a settled community and is introduced to Galak, a white chocolate bar. She learns that when you eat the chocolate you discover a special feeling called ‘love’. She comes from a place called City Bild, a continuously moving utopian city in constant upheaval and mutation

whose energy source is decomposing algae. The people of City Bild are not attached to the land nor are they attached to each other in any way. Once Upon a Time…In City Bild was first exhibited as part of an installation at Esther Schipper Gallery in Cologne. The exhibition was an extension of American artist Peter Fend’s project, City Bild.

Vidéo Ozone (1989) WITH BERNARD JOISTEN, DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOER-STER AND PIERRE JOSEPH4MIN 55SECU-MATIC, TRANSFERRED TO DCPCOLOUR, SOUND

Vidéo Ozone is composed of found footage in Super 8 and 16mm film, intersected with freeze-frame transitions, video effects and 3D graphics, all relating to perceptions of nature and the environment. The film comprises animated sequences, the filmed exploits of monoskier Bruno Gouvy and free-climber Patrick Edlinger, nature shots, extracts from manga cartoons, and home videos. all shown in succession to the soundtrack Coma II (A.M./O.K. by Mark Moore and Philip Glass (“S’Express”). The film was created during a period of increasing awareness about the greenhouse effect and holes within the ozone layer; and the images are remixed in a style reflective of the house music of the era. Originally projected on a huge inflatable television, the artists are happy for Vidéo Ozone to be shown anywhere – in an exhibition space, a city street, or a park.

Video direction: François ReymondImages:• Clouds and fractal mountains: Jean François Colonna, GSV/

Lactamme Ecole Polytechnique Dynamique;• Beach and ball: Helene Guermonprez;• Between fire and ice: François Reymond;• Red sea: Jean Reymond;• Computer-generated sea: Marc Joseph Sigaud, Nanh Viet N’guyen

Editing: Ridd ProductionMusic: Coma II (A.M./O.K.) a remix of Philip Glass by S’Express (Mark Moore)

Edition of 1, 4 artist’s proofsFirst presentation: De L’instabilité, Cnap/Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris, 16 November – 10 December 1989

Fleurs (1987) 52MINVIDEO 8, TRANSFERRED TO DCPCOLOUR, SILENT

This first video by Philippe Parreno, made while he was a student at the École supérieure d’art in Grenoble, is a continuous shot of a bouquet of flowers. With the camera positioned on a tripod, the only motion within the sequence is generated by controlling the zoom and focus of the lens. Parreno sent the video to television stations across France, allowing them to broadcast it in whatever form they wished, free of copyright restrictions. In 1988 the television channel Canal+ added a logo and music, and used a few seconds of the film as the background to the weather forecast sponsored by Interflora. In making the film and presenting it on television rather than in a gallery, Parreno was inspired by artist group General Idea, French artist Gerry Schum, and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1970s television projects. Philippe was also influenced by the pop-culture of the time, including the audio-visual saturation of television ads and music videos. Parreno’s use of the language of commercial television in Fleurs is indicative of his fascination with media as a manifestation of leisure in Postmodern society.