Le Bureau du statisticien

“There are no facts,” Nietzsche wrote, “only interpretations.” Today one might add: there are no data, only visualizations. The two statements would be more or less equivalent: as the quantity of data collected by statistics explodes, the question of how to manage, organize and present them becomes ever more pressing. This change of scale now goes by the name of Big Data, literally “metadata”. A change not merely of degree but truly of kind: the squaring-up of the world becomes its representation, a representation in the almost pictorial sense of the term, in which the human factor resurfaces within the very preserve of science.

It is this turning point that Mikaël Monchicourt brings into view with Le Bureau du statisticien, a fictional set-up in which neither the computer workstation nor the office equipment is missing. A way of setting the stage for an encounter with the diagrams displayed on the walls: chosen at random by selecting the first five results offered by Google, they were printed and then distorted by moving the sheet inside the scanner. Transformed into abstractions, they offer a commentary on the necessary manipulation of statistical data. As with Walid Raad and the fake archives he produces as part of The Atlas Group project, or with Wesley Meuris and FEAK, his real-fake global multinational that guarantees a successful exhibition every time, light is never so well shed as when it is glimpsed in the mirror of fiction.