Isabelle Gagné in Residence
RESIDENCE
En attendant l’été
(Waiting for Summer)
Isabelle Gagné, Mirabel, Québec | isabellegagne.ca
Born in 1970 in Boisbriand, Isabelle Gagné lives and works in Mirabel.
Cofounder of Mouvement Art Mobile (MAM), she has presented her work in individual and collective exhibitions in Canada and abroad, including at Maison de la culture Mercier in Montreal (2017), at Irohani Gallery in Osaka (2014), at Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides in Saint-Jérôme (2014), at Centre national d’exposition in Saguenay (2014), at Factory Art Gallery in Berlin (2013), at Centre d’Art Léo-Ayotte in Shawinigan (2012), at Gallery on the Corner in London (2011), at MMS Gallery in Philadelphia (2011), and at Madrid Hub (2010). She was part of Mois de la Photo à Montréal in 2015 and won the Silver Award in the Creative Photography category at the 36th National Magazine Awards in 2012.
RESIDENCE AT RENCONTRES
En attendant l’été
(Waiting for Summer)
Stratotype digital—ien is an autonomous bot operating on Twitter that randomly recomposes pictures of the Québec landscape. Its function is to transform photos, either taken by myself or collected from ordinary people in the course of one year. The images thus modified will create unusual visual occurrences of the Québec region on the Web and on search engines, and will generate a new layer of digital data until now non-existent on the Web.
In geology, the stratotype corresponds to a junction between two fossiliferous strata that serves as a benchmark in determining a given period. The digital robot will act as an intermediary between two strata of digital information. Unlike its geological counterpart, it will not enable a definition of the time scale but instead the creation of a binder between two digital states of an image: the first state corresponding to the physical appearance of a natural Québec landscape, the second, and the intermediary, transformed, demonstrating the digital proposal created by the robot.
The objective of these new data generated by the robot is to expand the photo archives of Québec’s unique heritage on the Web. By digitally optimizing the collective landscape-related memory, Stratotype digital—ien preserves its longevity. The photographs reworked by the bot will inevitably be documented as taking stock of an existing place belonging to a geographic region of Québec, but they will show us that place as a different digital version. The database will evolve and will demonstrate digital geodiversity through my eyes and the eyes of the other people involved.
The gathering of photos will stretch over a year and begin during the artist’s residence at Rencontres photographiques in 2017, culminating in a new exhibit at Rencontres in 2018.
Stratotype digital—ien
Deployment of the stratotype.ca platform and its Web robot (Bot), which recomposes in random fashion pictures of the Québec landscape collected from ordinary people.
Presented in association with TOPO – Laboratory for Digital Writings
