Engaging with both analogue methods such as painting on canvas and projecting whispers of intimate encounters onto various types of digital screens, her work emerges at the crossroads between the two. Motifs surrounding the materialisation of digital language and more specifically the digitisation of our private lives, cross and crumble throughout her work as if caught in a post-internet embrace. Goupy’s work is a cosmos that serves to depict the hybrid and tumultuous relationship between humans and machines.

Can you introduce yourself to our readers? Describe who you are and what you do in your own words.

Hi! My name is Anais Goupy, I am a french artist currently based in Leipzig. I work on multimedia installations where I mix hybrid digital and analogue sculptures, paintings and videos. I have always worked with painting and video in parallel, and my universe is really inspired by 90’s pop culture, science fiction books and blockbusters. When I moved to Germany, I fell in love with internet culture and in particular, the net-artist & post-internet art movement. Since 2017, I have also been working as a digital designer in 3D and animation.

What are the main ideas that you want your work to portray?

My work explores the relationship we have with technology in our daily lives and how it impacts our visions of intimacy, love and vulnerability. I also embrace feminism as a vision to approach the world with more sensibility, spirituality and magic. Pop culture is one of my biggest inspirations and I see it as a playground to reflect on major themes: feminism, capitalism and our future.

Explain the process behind designing the 3D animation for the video game project: “Sphinx”. Working with the students of Collège Beausoleil, in Paris, how did this collaboration emerge? What does working collaboratively bring you that you couldn’t do alone?

I was approached by Io Burgard, a great artist and friend of mine, to digitally model the characters and universe of this video game project “Sphinx”. The idea to create a video game emerged in a workshop with students at the College “Beausoleil”. The students began by modelling some characters with clay and made some drawings. I really enjoyed working with them. In this case, I was a digital creator, so I was trying to capture the world and the sensibility of Io and bring it into 3D with the right colours, materials and atmosphere. What I like about this kind of collaboration is that I can concentrate only on the aesthetic aspect of the project and I can discuss with the artist and bring the ideas to life in an exchange of different types of sensibility and visions.

How does the process of designing for a physical, gallery-like space differ from designing for an online space? What relationship do the physical and the digital have within your work and how does your work flicker and mutate between the two?

I would say one of the biggest and most important differences to me is how you move your body while creating. When I work with 3D programs, for example, I sit hours from my computer and fall into a spiral — a kind of meditative state. It is as if my brain is absorbed by the screen. The colours and the realism which 3D design is capable of producing is so fascinating. I also have the same fascination while painting. Most of the things I do for the physical space is computer-generated, so once I create the objects or patterns on the computer, I begin looking for the possibilities to bring it to the physical: through paintings, sculptures etc. Actually, the digital space for me is a kind of mental space. As it also happens, I tend to find solutions or inspirations as I go about my physical life (working in the studio, travelling, reading books). Both the digital and physical are totally codependent and it is always a back and forth movement, despite the tools, time and space not being the same.

Your most recent exhibition at the Archiv Massiv In Leipzig, entitled ‘One Like One Amen’, ended last month. Could you talk a little about the inspiration for the exhibition and how you came up with the title?

For this exhibition, I wanted to bring the digital matter into the daylight of a physical space and make it sensible/tangible. My previous exhibitions were immersive video projection installations that were evolving in the darkness. I've often been working with natural landscapes — this time I decided to build a kind of digital forest. My research was focused on creating a digital camouflage: an abstract form transitioning through different displays, physical dimensions, histories and societies.

"How everybody uses everything — How everything uses everybody" is written on a painting by Zadie Smith about the Roman “Crash” of J.G Ballard, which explains “the way technology has entered into even our most intimate human relations. Not man-as-technology-forming but technology-as-man-forming”. I was really interested in this idea and it made me reflect on how technology impacts my personal life.

The title "One Like One Amen" was actually part of the texts the small ventilators were projecting. I often collect text and memes from Instagram or create them myself. This one is really simple, direct and speaks a lot about the faith we give to social networks via superficial attention.

The digitisation of our private lives plays a protuberant theme throughout the exhibition. To what extent do you feel our intimate relationships and experiences with friends and relatives are surmounted by the digital? Is this a positive or a negative observation?

I love to spend time on the internet, and I also used to post my daily life on Instagram until I chose instead to work on this theme, which encouraged me to observe at a more measured distance. I think the presence of words, memes and text, is an important illustration of what communication represents on social media. I collect them and the ones which speak to me. Some are funny, some are mean or cynical, some are more pondered. Maybe what fails is the consciousness of our behaviour on social networks. A lot of us behave as if what we are sharing has no influence because we stand behind the screen and we don't see our audience. So at least it is kind of narcissistic and there is no place for real exchange. I do believe we need the IRL to discuss some subjects and that our smartphone is just a tool that you have to know how to use.

How do you think the role of technology will continue to affect the way we communicate in the future? Will it go much further than where we are in the present?

I guess we won't stop the evolution of technology. As it develops further, I ask myself, how do we behave in relation to it and how do we organise ourselves to build a better relationship? The last time I was in Tokyo, I was thinking that the city could represent our future. I’ve observed the loneliness of people, probably not just induced by technology but I hope we will find some solutions to it. Until now, we couldn’t really fall in love with robots.

Where do you wish to take your practice going forward?

I would like to extend these installations and my art practice to other places, galleries and institutions. Next year, I will do my post-diploma exhibition in a gallery, which I can’t reveal the name yet, in Leipzig. And this summer I was invited to be part of an exhibition taking place in the biggest club of Leipzig, Institut Für Zukunft, which kind of uses the same concept of the exhibition in Berghain in Berlin during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, I am building a graphic design studio with two other artists to produce some interactive digital content for clients. I am looking forward to these next projects and see myself as being more present in the physical space and the contemporary art scene than ever before.