NO BRAINER features a series of sculptures by French artist Basile Fournier, used as a support for the words of Shumon Basar and plundged in Malibu’s soft, reverbed vocals and melodic chord progressions. The exhibition examines the impacts technology has on the relentless passage of time and offers a reflective exploration of how digital mediums shape and distort our human connections.
SRC003 NO BRAINER 05-C, Basile Fournier, 2024
YOU ARE CUTE
YOU ARE JOY
Fournier uses elements of internet visual language—such as the decaying aesthetics of deep-fried memes and sad emojis—with a range of industrial materials like server racks, TV mounts, and aluminum frames, evoking the erosion of meaning amplified by Basar’s daring slogans. Live webcam feeds of deserted, paradisiacal beaches—once symbols of escape—now suggest a haunting sense of loss and disconnection, reinforcing the exhibition’s themes of unavoidable loneliness and the fleeting tension between *reel* and *possible* experiences.
SRC003 NO BRAINER 03-B, Basile Fournier, 2024
SRC003 NO BRAINER 03-B, Basile Fournier, 2024
YOU ARE TRUTH
YOU ARE LIGHT
All of Encore’s projects start with language. The ultimate prompt. NO BRAINER came as an evidence as one of those vacuum expressions that sounds like anything and nothing at the same time — a music album, an Adult Swim show, a streetwear brand, a tech startup.
Its potential rely only on its simplicity and musical impact, but also in the rich tension and meaning it suggests. The English language often encapsulates complex ideas in just a few words, turning our conversations into a series of concept-capsules. But using these phrases allows us to say more or less? This is where Encore finds its purpose: navigating the space between ‘deep and shallow,’ or perhaps pushing both extremes simultaneously.
SRC003 NO BRAINER 00-C, Basile Fournier, 2024
SRC003 NO BRAINER 05-B, Basile Fournier, 2024
SRC003 NO BRAINER 05-B, Basile Fournier, 2024
SRC003 NO BRAINER 07-D, Basile Fournier, 2024
SRC003 NO BRAINER 07-D, Basile Fournier, 2024
Freed by AI from highly rational, analytical tasks and jobs, could this spark a cognitive revolution fostering intuition, emotion, subjectivity or symbiosis? Idle states like meditation, trance, or hypnosis, often triggered by repetition (ironically, also a machine-like feature) reflect another side of NO BRAINER. It referring to an alternative brain state, a connection to our inner animal or archaic self. A flow where ego fades and intuition takes over. One one side, the literal absence of a brain (as in machines), on another side an intuition-driven force, beyond rationalism and analysis. What kind of NO BRAINER ethic could emerge?
SRC003 NO BRAINER, Life, Basile Fournier, 2024
YOU ARE VIRTUE
YOU ARE ENERGY
SRC003 NO BRAINER 06-C, Basile Fournier, 2024
SRC003 NO BRAINER 06-A, Basile Fournier, 2024
No brain, no intellect, no consciousness. Human VS Machine. How come *No Brainer* entities could take over our jobs and displace us from the first floor of the pyramid we proudly occupied for hundreds of thousand years? This well trodden debate is currently trusted by Artificial Intelligence (AI), an entity without a brain, that acts like it has a brain and which infrastructure mimics a brain (neural networks). But this overlook an important aspect: technologies doesn’t impacts us only where successfully integrated but rather where it fails repeteadly. Where it is non-applicable, technologies forces us to redefine ourselves.
YOU ARE EMPTY
YOU ARE ENOUGH
