Les Liens Invisibles was an artistic entity active between 2006 and 2015, operating somewhere between net art, tactical media, and mild system malfunction. Founded by Guido Segni and Gionatan Quintini, it presented itself as an “imaginary art group”, which is to say, a collective identity designed to reduce authorship and increase ambiguity.
Context and method
The project emerged during the transition from an open web to a platform-controlled ecosystem, and responded accordingly: not by exiting the system, but by entering it incorrectly. Strategies included infiltration, reverse engineering, subvertising, and other forms of polite sabotage.
Their work focused on making visible what usually remains implicit: the invisible links between users, interfaces, data flows, and behavioral patterns. These links were not illustrated, but stressed, until they produced side effects.
Selected projects
Seppukoo (2009) — a form of voluntary disappearance from social networks, reframing disconnection as a public gesture. The platform, represented at the time by Mark Zuckerberg, responded with a formal cease-and-desist, effectively confirming that even leaving the system could be considered a violation of its terms.
The Invisible Pavilion (2011) — an augmented reality pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (June–November 2011), curated with Simona Lodi and produced with Manifest.AR. It occupied institutional space without physically being there, using augmented reality as a way to bypass permissions. Participating artists included Artie Vierkant, Constant Dullaart, CONT3XT.NET, IOCOSE, Jon Rafman, Molleindustria, Parker Ito, and REFF – RomaEuropa FakeFactory.
Repetitionr.com (2010) — a tactical media service; discussed at transmediale 2011 in Berlin together with Geoff Cox and Franco Berardi.
R.I.O.T. – Reality Is Out There (2010).
An environment to be misused
Across platforms and contexts, Les Liens Invisibles treated the internet less as a tool and more as an environment to be misused. Participation was encouraged, but not optimized. Visibility was not a goal. Failure was often part of the interface.
The project ended in 2015, more or less intentionally. Its authorship partially reappeared under different names, suggesting that identity, like any other system, is subject to versioning, obsolescence, and occasional leaks.