Alexandre Castonguay : Inscriptions

24 August - 28 September 2013

The exhibition proposes an insight into the process by which codes shape our perception as they assemble, generate, re-engineer or erase information in the course of producing an image. Whether performative or documentary, the assembled works reveal the relationship between data and the personal or mediated self.

Iterative in nature, the works assembled develop further the artist' stance on the codes of art practice. The 'work studies' extend to a series of dry point etchings that, through a program and visual analysis, translate the artist's hand movements when writing code, editing photographs or browsing online social networks. The precise position of the hands are analysed, stored and drawn by a plotting machine. The resulting abstracted image is reminiscent of artistic methods used at the turn of the last century to reveal the innermost drives of the artist. They actually belong to the tradition of the 'flâneur' or 'infra-mince' propositions of the artist at work.

Inscriptions is a series of database driven drawing machines assembled to draw in ink on 'artist' carnet's'. They do so in the handwriting of a few writers and artists such as Duchamp and Beuys, whose correspondance is assembled and studied in order to produce, at a command, new pages of texts, notes and ideas. Networked, the machines also allow for the transcriptions of notes from the artist using the handwriting fonts as a 'writing double' indistinguishable from the others. The act of inscribing by a tiny drawing machine on the intimate format of a notebook produces an uncanny, almost photographic double.

Agit P.O.V. (Petit Objet de Vélo) is a microhack for bicycles relying on the persistence of vision (POV) effect, the propaganda tactics of the russian avant-garde (AGIT Prop) and the SpokePOV Project by Limor Fried (LadyAda). A modest 12 LED circuit, an microcontroller circuit, code and a battery mounted on your bicycle wheel and the speed of the cyclist suffice to illuminate the streets with your poetical-political message.

AGIT P.O.V. invites participants to workshops and textual performances in the streets of our cities. Our bicycles are vehicles that can carry our poetic and creative voices and agitate the city. POV (Persistance of Vision) is a phenomenon based on the residual presence of an image on the eye for 1/25th of a second. The myth of persistente of vision posits that the human perception of motion is the result of persistence of vision. In this way, the drawings of the zoetrope, the photographic experiments of Muybridge on the successive instants of a horse's gallop produce the impression of the continuity of movement. In the gallery, 3 wall mounted motorized arms manifest the texts decided by the participants in the past workshops.