Inaugurating the third cycle of the Frontier program, "Geopolitics, variable spaces", TOPO presents artist Paolo Almario's Leviathan project from Tuesday April 20, 2021.
This digital work refers to the thought and book of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, A Treatise on the Matter, Form and Power of the Ecclesiastical and Civil Republic, in which he defines nation-states as giants called Leviathans. What defines Hobbes's Leviathans are their constituent units (humans) and the interactions between them.
Initially conceived as a robotic installation where tracers inscribe traces on a canvas, the work Leviathan has been adapted for online distribution, in the form of an interactive website where visitors are invited to leave the imprint of their passage. The data captured by the computer's camera - facial movements, date and duration of presence - are used to create plots offering a topology of the interactions that collectively take place there. No other data is retained, leaving only what makes up Paolo Almario's Leviathan: virtual tableaux of lines and dots resulting from the audience's interaction with the digital capture systems. For this web version, the paintings resulting from the data capture will be regularly stopped over time and archived in the website's virtual gallery.
Play your part in Paolo Almario's Leviathan by registering your tracks.
Activate your computer's camera and let it follow you, capturing the movements of your face and composing, in real time, the traces of multiple interactions that are superimposed and amalgamated in a virtual, collective map.
Against the backdrop of a pandemic in which virtual communication feeds immense databases ad infinitum, Paolo Almario's Leviathan invites us to reflect on some of the issues at stake in today's cyberspace: surveillance, privacy, big data and the omnipotence of networks...
"The main political bodies, states, are compositions of individual units. Indeed, we must think of political societies as artificial compounds, automata made up entirely of human animals."
(Thomas Hobbes, 1651).
A virtual meeting with the artist took place on Tuesday April 27.
Photo credit :
Patrick Simard
Paolo Almario
Paolo Almario is a digital artist of Colombian origin based in Chicoutimi since 2011. He began his career in 2014 with projects related to the impact Colombia's conflict had on his family. The repercussions of his artistic engagement led him to seek the protection of the Canadian Government, where he has had refugee status since 2015.
He trained at the Facultad de Arquitectura y Diseño of Universidad Los Andes (Bogota, Colombia). In 2014, he completed a Master of Arts at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC). His work has been supported on several occasions by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) and the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2018, he was awarded the Prix du CALQ - Créateur de l'année in Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean. His work has been exhibited in Canada, Colombia, Italy, Belgium and France.
In his practice, Paolo Almario uses digital technologies to collect, analyze, codify, process and transform samples of reality into a plurality of artistic forms. Focusing on installation, software and electro-mechanical art, he explores the relationship between the individual and space, focusing on notions of identity, spatio-temporality and socio-politics.
