Félix Côte

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Every day, thousands of people choose to remove their content from social media. YouTube, in particular, is home to a large number of ephemeral amateur videos in which people express themselves about their daily lives. Although soon deleted, these clips do present a sincere landscape of our connected societies. 

In the manner of a genizah, a place of temporary conservation of sacred documents in Judaism, Delete Foreverproposes a way of safeguarding these personal videos. In a derelict space, printers carry out the ritual preservation of these media on paper, giving them material form for the first time. Given the loss of control over our personal data online, network-quitters may have found a solution.

Félix Côte

Born in 1993 in France, Félix Côte appropriates digital and new technologies in order to use them as critical tools. He has a hybrid background, with degrees in both multimedia engineering and art-science, and creates installations that confront the public with their own practices of digital technology and the Internet. He works with video, code and network tools. His approach is to seek out abandoned and little-known areas in order to find out what machines do little, do badly or cannot do at all. In particular, since 2020 he has been creating a series of installations called La Formation des Fossiles, which explores the content of social networks that elude algorithms. He is studying their possible integration into contemporary memory at a time of obsolescence, while anticipating the end of the Internet.

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