Inaugurating the third cycle of programming on the theme of Frontiers, “Geopolitics, Variable Spaces,” TOPO presents, starting Tuesday, April 20, 2021, the project Léviathan by artist Paolo Almario.

This digital work refers to the thinking and book of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Léviathan, Traité de la matière, de la forme et du pouvoir de la république ecclésiastique et civile, where he defines nation states as giants called Leviathans. What defines Hobbes' Leviathans are the units that compose them (humans) and the interactions between them.

Originally designed as a robotic installation where plotters draw lines on a canvas, the work Léviathan has been adapted for online distribution in the form of an interactive website where visitors are invited to leave their mark. The data captured by the computer's camera—facial movements, date, and duration of presence—is used to create tracings that offer a topology of the interactions that take place there collectively. No other data is stored, leaving only what constitutes the Léviathan by Paolo Almario: virtual paintings of lines and dots resulting from audience interaction with digital capture systems. For this web version, the paintings created from the captured data will be regularly frozen in 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.

With LéviathanIn this pandemic context, where virtual communication endlessly feeds huge databases, Paolo Almario invites us to reflect on some of the challenges of 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)

The Leviathan is a colossal monster, dragon, serpent, or crocodile, whose form is not specified; it can be considered as the evocation of a terrifying cataclysm capable of altering the planet and disrupting its order and geography, if not destroying the world.

Leviathan is said to be one of the main demons of hell. Depicted in the Middle Ages as an open mouth swallowing souls, it symbolizes the entrance to hell.

Définition du Léviathan librement adaptée de Wikipédia

Thomas Hobbes (Wikipedia)

Léviathan (Wikipedia)

Meeting with the artist

Tuesday, April 27, Paolo Almario presented his work Léviathan and its various iterations, in the company of author and curator Mirna Boyadjian and mediator Nathalie Dion from the artists' center. Caravansérail, in Rimouski, which hosted the original robotic version of the Léviathan de Paolo Almario.