Maxime Guyon pays close attention to the evolution, dematerialisation and commercial purpose of the photographic medium, and in his Technological Exaptation series reveals an aesthetic individual to the new technologies and industrial development. Their biomimetic, extra-terrestrial and mechanical outbursts reflect an industrial evolution focused on cybernetics, performance, seduction and the seizing of power over the human body. For Maxime Guyon, the digital corruption at the heart of his work has not only stimulated the artistic creation of the photographic work, it has also liberated the material depiction of the image. In other words, artists are increasingly experiencing new dimensions of installations, sometimes even freeing the image from its traditional frame and strict hanging process, exploiting the image in a physical and three-dimensional way. In the biological field, the term exaptation describes an opportunistic selective adaptation, favouring characteristics that are useful for a new purpose for which they had not initially been selected. Adapted to the short history of photography, it is here a question of considering how it has developed since the Internet, and the increasingly dominant place the image occupies as the object most widely consumed by earth-dwellers on a daily basis. Thinking about how machines and algorithms today participate in the distribution and production of the images on the Internet, one wonders if that phenomenon does not imply a redefinition of how human beings are and how they see themselves in the world.

Maxime Guyon (*1990, France, lives and works in Lausanne). His approach, straddled between commercial commissions, artistic projects and research, is representative of a generation of photographers who occupy territories opened up by the malleability of the photographic medium. A graduate of the ECAL in Lausanne, he currently holds the post of assistant to the Master of Photography and participates actively in the Augmented Photography research programme run by Milo Keller. He took part in the following Foam Talents exhibitions: Beaconsfield Gallery, Vauxhall, London; Red Hook Labs, Brooklyn; Unseen Festival, Amsterdam; and in the Swiss Design Awards, Basel, Festival Circulation, Paris, and Austin Center for Photography.

Photography : Maxime Guyon, tiré de la série Technological Exaptation, 2016