JULIEN BONET - Wired

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Size: 50 x 40 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2024

Signed, dated and edition numbered by the artist on a separate label.

Wired (2024)

A person, completely wrapped in a tangle of colorful cables, stands motionless in front of a caravan. In the background, a satellite dish, a gray sky, and asphalt. The scene seems both familiar and strange: a documentary shot of a rural location—yet permeated with a surreal exaggeration.

With Wired, Julien Bonet takes his masquerade project into a radically contemporary realm. The figure evokes archaic European winter customs in which bodies were disfigured with straw, fur, or masks to summon nature spirits or ward off evil. Here, Bonet replaces the traditional materials with cables—symbols of our digital present, signs of networking, surveillance, and the flood of data.

The figure is both protected and imprisoned: the cables provide both armor and a prison. They evoke the paradox of modern technology, which simultaneously connects and isolates us. The pose—frontal, calm, anonymous—invites us to reflect on the loss of individual identity in the digital age.

Bonet's AI-based approach reinforces this ambivalence. By using AI as a "synthetic camera," he creates images that appear like documents, even though they depict events that never happened. This tension between credibility and fiction is the appeal of Wired : a modern mythogram that ritualizes our dependence on technology.