The 5th floor

Due to the corona virus outbreak, the “physical” exhibition spaces of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève are temporarily closed to the public. We express our solidarity with sick people, health workers, and all those who are still heading to their workplaces every day.

While we wait out this public health crisis, the Centre’s activity has shifted entirely to our digital platform, the 5th floor. The four floors of our physical location may be closed, but this virtual space is guaranteed to be safe!

We warmly welcome you to stop by the 5th floor to enjoy music, new commissions, exclusive works, artists’ interviews, and poetry readings! In these times of turmoil, we continue to create opportunities to support artists. Here we offer those artists a platform for their digital work (with new commissioned material to follow soon)—and a place, enriched each Thursday, for our public to find inspiration.

The 5th floor
The 5th floor brings together a digital production space, a radio station, and a tool for disseminating artists’ voices and ideas.

On the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève website, it serves as a window, a virtual space that extends and completes the programming hosted on the Centre’s physical floors. We see it as a tool for artistic experimentation, a continuously renewed laboratory for sound and vision.

Radio
New music selections by Guillaume Sorge for everyone who has to stay home
During this special time, Guillaume Sorge will enrich the 5th floor’s radio every Thursday with several hours of music selected piece by piece to counter the stress of confinement. A random, horizontal journey, alternating rarities, soundscapes, installation soundtracks, field recordings and (unfairly) little-known classics.

Ambient piece by Pierre Rousseau
Our latest carte blanche is a contribution by French musician Pierre Rousseau, a 21-minute ambient piece composed for the latest fashion show of the French brand Études.

Works
Five videos and a newly commissioned work by Aria Dean published in the next weeks
In the coming six weeks, six exclusive videos by Aria Dean will be published every Thursday. Each available for seven days only, the works will propose a panorama of Dean’s recent video work. This selection will culminate with a newly commissioned piece, published on April 23, on Aria Dean’s current project Music for Plants.

Eulogy for a Black Mass, currently online, is a narrated compilation which overlays videos shared on social media with a voiceover that interrogates the structures that shape the meaning and perception of blackness. At the center of Dean’s investigation are online memes, which the artist compares to blackness, as they may be both understood as dynamic entities that circulate through networks, reflecting each other in their mutability. 

Now online! Riccardo Benassi, Techno Casa – an introduction to
If already in 2011 according to Riccardo Benassi, “the military wing of the digital revolution was the transformation of every room into an office,” how will our domestic landscape and our technologically mediated relation with the outside world change, now that we (the lucky few) are slowly adapting to become hikikomori? This video-essay—made available to the online audience for the first time in three different languages—offers a critical reflection on the rampant virtualization of the real, starting from the superimposition of the understanding of our home with the one of our world.

Words
Now online! Xavier Oberson on the taxation of robots
The increasing use of artificial intelligence within the workplace is likely to cause significant disruption to the labor market and, in turn, to the economy. This is due to a reduction in the number of workers and with it, taxes. In this short video, Xavier Oberson presents his book Taxing Robots (Cheltenham Gloss: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019), the first publication to ever explore the taxation of robots as a possible solution to the anticipated shortfall in tax revenues.