Interventions

The robotic agents are entirely autonomous. While moving on water, they collect, store, and interpret data from various environmental conditions such as water quality, air quality, temperature, ambient light, and sound. For example, an increase in temperature read by one of the agent's sensors may cause it to increase its speed. This behaviour will influence its neighbouring agents, who will then respond by changing their own behaviours. These agents will in turn influence their neighbouring agents, thus creating a ripple effect of actions.

From these simple programmed correlations between the agents, a complex and unpredictable group behaviour will thus emerge. This emergent behaviour will signify unseen characteristics of their immediate milieu. In other words, a group behavior that is specific to the presentation site will emerge from the individual agents' interactions with one another and their local environment. Responding to the hidden features of the urban environment, the agents will offer viewers a new perspective on their local area, providing them opportunities for relating to it in unexpected ways. Furthermore, the simultaneous presence of groups of agents in different locations will allow viewers to make comparisons and create connections between sites.

Absences is an intervention project that involves electronic devices installed in outdoor environments. Taking shape at the frontier of new media and environmental art, it proposes a meditation on solitude and association, interaction and adaptation, natural and artificial, biological and inanimate. Each intervention consists in the creation and installation of autonomous electronic devices in various ecosystems. These artificial agents act within their specific environment. The project is created as an ongoing, residency-based process which was largely site-specific, each context contributing to the conceptual and technical development of the work.

The project consists in a series of five experimental outdoor interventions, produced between 2008 and 2011 in different residencies around the globe. Each intervention of the series seeks to integrate an autonomous, solar-powered electronic agent into a nonhuman ecosystem. These agents try to adapt to their environment in order to survive, meet their own needs, achieve their own goals, fulfill their own desires. They thus work the opposite of traditional technologies (which try to use nature in order to satisfy human needs). The constraints imposed by the nature of the work and the methodology (electronics, small budgets, residencies, nomadism, energy self-sufficiency) create a situation where the technology is always in an inferiority relationship with its environment.

This adaptive activity between the agents and their environment is mirrored in the research-creation process itself, each intervention being openly determined by the residency context in which they are created. The research-creation process itself is duly documented in pictures, schemas, sketches, notes, text and video. The project also relies on a set of constraints specific to work in residency and thus favors low-fi, open-source and DIY approaches over high-end, proprietary solutions.

Exhibition

The work is shown with a video installation specifically designed for the series. It consists of five (5) small HDTV screens distributed on the floor. Each screen displays a 12-15 minutes video documentation from one of the episodes of the series, containing a mix of footage from the research-creation process, including experiments, prototypes and pictures. The installation offers to the visitor a deconstructed narrative of a long project, made of a mix-match of scientific experiments, sketches, diagrams, landscapes and adventures. It's structure provides many possibilities for the visitors to circulate in the work and relate to it.

Additional material such as broken parts and devices, reproductions, original notes and sketches, etc. can also be included as part of the exhibition, if the space allows it.

Accrochages is a urban electronic intervention project by Montreal-based artists Sofian Audry and Samuel St-Aubin. It stems from their will to bring their art practice out of the walls of a gallery space, on the walls of the city itself. The intent is to build small active and autonomous objects that can, through simple means, give new qualities to the city environment by creating different interactive situations.

The project proposes different models of objects. Some of them are produced in large amount, while others are unique. They display different kinds of behaviors through the use of simple sensors and emitters (e.g. light-sensor, distance sensor, microphone, LED, speaker, LED display, etc). Objects produced as part of Accrochages should ultimately be auto-sufficient (ie. able to recharge themselves, with solar panels for instance) and low-cost (we are targeting less than 15 Euros).