2024-2026 Programming

Artist in the visual and digital arts and a member of TOPO’s board of directors.

TOPO issued a call for proposals for its 2024-26 programming in June 2023, exhibition projects for the Vitrine, co-production projects with or without an exhibition component and longer-term projects with public participation. The call was open to both emerging and established artists. The selection committee decided not to impose a theme in order to broaden the range of proposals and to take the pulse of artists exploring numerous fields of interest with a great diversity of technological tools.

The themes that arose in the fourteen projects chosen from among the sixty-four received fall under the categories nostalgia, ecology and simulacra. Several projects go beyond more than a single theme, sometimes with humour, poetry or the use of artificial intelligence.

Nostalgia is found in three projects whose starting point is an aesthetic of a 1980s arcade game. “Brume,” by Pixels Collectif, reflects the eco-anxiety of its creators. Players must put out devastating fires with a misty cloud. A kind of nostalgia is also found in the poetry translated into ASCII code in the work by Pascale Tétrault, “Je t’écris.” Finally, in “Soba’s Corner: A Chinese-Canadian Cooking Show – Snack Witch Joni Cheung,” the artist uses the humour and irony of television cooking shows to fill the gaps of a culture which has not been transmitted from one generation to the next. We will be expecting you in September 2024 to prepare dumplings.

Humour returns under the theme of simulacra in the fake documentaries by Dominic Lafontaine and Léa Boudreau, in which conjecture and a change of perspective force us to think about our relations with the other. This nostalgia and the use of humour arise in reaction to the growing presence of AI, which opens new avenues and creates anxiety at one and the same time. What does it have in store for us? What will it replace? Technology can lie, it can bring back the dead, it can keep us alive in a creative manner and leave in limbo phantoms which have only ever existed on screen, as in the work by Alfred Muszynski, “The Dynamic of No Solace.” In “Murs de chair,” Léonie Bélanger and her associate Éloi Angers-Roy seize in suspension traces of movements which give form to digital space.

AI has made it possible to create a fake documentary on a conjectured city with the work “La ville Tolédère” by Dominic Lafontaine, as well as a fake animal documentary by Léa Boudreau, which uses the perspective of small machines to observe humans. AI has also made it possible to create fake news and fake archives in the work by Stephanie Creaghan, “The Dailies 2/ Au re-voir au quotidien (2).” “Cerebellum,” by the collective CÏO, is a still life depicted as a fake depressed ecosystem with the addition of emotional and anxious artificial intelligence. AI can create images and replace artists, and can replace itself, in the video essay “Revision: Dream State” by Mick Sand. Video and AI take the form of an ouroboros. All these works make it possible to think about the value of truth and community.

Other works explore the presence or absence of humans and how they affect their environment. In their absence, we discover the fascinating behaviour of animals and plants in “Un jardin la nuit,” by Caroline Hayeur and D. Kimm. With their presence, temperatures are rising, ice caps are melting and the seasons are turned upside down in the interactive work “Écosystème Alpha” by Aude Guivarc’h. “Mirages,” by Emmanuel Jouthe, uses dance to explore the distance and disconnect we have with living things by projecting choreographies onto wooden and ceramic objects. In “Ces objets qui m’entourent,” Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc employs everyday consumer objects she has reproduced, like vestiges of another age. These latter projects raise questions about what humans leave behind them as destructive processes on our ill-used planet accelerate.