Antoine Catala is obsessed with the banal, everyday use of the tools we use to communicate. He looks at platforms or devices, and scrutinizes how they are used to communicate, or more often than not miscommunicate. At the center of all Catala does is language. New platforms of communication (such as twitter, text messages, blogs) allow language to evolve in radical new ways (emojis stand in for words, written messages get shorter and shorter, audio or videos augment text).

Language has always had a profound symbiotic bond with technology. Catala uses technology, often crude or anachronistic, to epitomize the transformations of the new technologies. The given implication is that the new communication technologies in turn transform language, and therefore us. Catala’s position is more ambiguous. In his words: “In studying these new forms of language I am interested not so much in what is changing or lost within us each time we adopt a new mode of communication, but what remains, what is fixed and in that, what makes it uniquely, deeply human about the way we communicate.”

As time progresses, Catala says he is getting more and more fascinated in how art exists in a room, and the feelings - often alienating - attached to an exhibition and an exhibition space.