Introduction
I produced this Feature for Québec New York 2001 and, intending to give wide public exposure to Quebec Web art, was to publish it first on that event's Web site. Following the disaster in New York last September 11th, this publication was cancelled, as were most of the projects to be presented in the framework of the event. Despite these tragic circumstances, the publication of this feature was made possible in this special edition of the CIAC Electronic Art Magazine devoted to Web art in Quebec.

Promoting all forms of artistic creation in Quebec, the event Québec New York 2001 wanted to give special attention to the most innovative work in the field of new technologies. Such a context has given me the opportunity of highlighting 15 works designed for the Web and of thus providing an overview of Web art in Quebec, a project that connects with interests that have engaged me the past several years.

This invitation allowed me to choose works that I consider both significant in the evolution of Web art and indicative of the various themes and aesthetics adopted by artists working in this medium. Produced in the last few years, the works I selected are very different from one another. While the Web is a relatively recent creative medium, technologies evolve so quickly that it is sometimes difficult to have a historical perspective on this development and to judge the art works on their own merits.

What I present is therefore a history of Web art seen through the lens of Quebec-based creation and centred on several of its particularly compelling moments. I would like to offer some reflections that may contribute to an appreciation of this art, from the earliest project (1996) to the most recent (2000). This survey could certainly have included other important works, but the production of a more extensive study would have required more space and time than was available to us. Nevertheless, I think the works presented here provide a fairly reliable outline of the development of various issues in Web art in Quebec.

 

Pascale Malaterre
Ex-voto
January 1996
Like many projects in the early years of the Web, Ex-voto takes the form of a "collaborative and relational work of communication" (see Pour une typologie de la création sur Internet, http://www.olats.org/setF6.html, by Annick Bureaud). Later, I discuss Dreamed, another such project. These productions are in keeping with a major axis in communications arts. While the latter may have long preceded the Web (on other networks, created by telecommunications, mail, minitel, photocopiers, and so on), they have literally exploded with the advent of this extraordinary means of dissemination. Moreover, based on the input of many participants and relying on such contributions for their content, these works emphasize art's reliance on collective action rather than on a single author.

Ex-voto has two parts: the "chain" of testimonials and expressions of thanksgiving by the site's many participants, and the "museum," a large collection of images of votive offerings drawn from various cultures and times and with which the chain of contributions is associated. Primarily based on its participants' messages - and therefore on the written word, as with many projects in the first years of the Web, Ex-voto also integrates images throughout the site. These images are small (even if graphical browsers first appear with Mosaic, in 1993, minimal bandwidth and modest computer resources constrained the use of images), but they are significant in helping to create a bridge between the different parts of the project, associating the petitions with the thanksgiving, but not establishing a necessary link between the two.

The project brings together very touching testimonials and creates strong "connections" between different people, times, and places. These connections rest on acts of fervor and generosity and afford a glimpse of participants from different places and settings. The project explodes prejudices of all kinds and reveals a social and political commitment. Such commitment is very present in Web art, inscribed as it is in a commercial environment that many artists oppose. In its way, Ex-voto holds to these convictions while offering a poetic work that avoids a purely didactic discourse. Ex-voto testifies to universality and equality between individuals without calling upon encompassing theories. It calls for solidarity and consequently touches on the essence of network art.

 

Frédérick Belzile
Dreamed
Summer 1996
Online since 1996, Dreamed receives visitors' dreams. One after the other, visitors contribute their dreams to an altogether unique database on people's inner life. Projects such as this aim to transform the commercial face of the Web, to infuse humanity into an environment dominated by corporate interests, to nourish it with the subjectivities that inhabit its space.

Very early in Web history - well before the emergence of the many theories on the subject, projects like Dreamed revealed the profoundly psychological nature of cyberspace. Veiled in anonymity in front of the computer screen, the individual opens up and exteriorizes himself in an ever expanding public space. Personal home pages and the intimate exchanges that occur on the Web through e-mail and chat have fostered personal expression and the dissemination of the most personal content. Dreamed addresses this phenomenon.

Thanks to browser frame technology, now taken for granted but a "novelty" when this project was produced (frames came into being with Netscape 2.0, in March 1996, and Explorer 3.0, in August 1996), the dream consultation resembles a lexical search. Keyword connections take readers from dream to dream by leaps through space (that of the page) and time (the chronology of the contributions), weaving links between them and highlighting the connections between individuals' unconscious universes. One could imagine that, one day, all the words of every dream might be joined together to produce a vast index, an odd lexicon making no claims to authority of any kind. Dreams, unaltered, enter this space as they are given, one after the other; Belzile acts only as initiator and guardian of the collection. No path is dictated, as everyone makes their own way through the dreams and experiences them as they please. In this sense, Dreamed emphasizes that which is inalienable in the individual, even when confronted with the most invasive of spaces or cyberspaces: one's inner world.

 

Doyon/Demers
Doyon/Demers Socio-esthéticiens
August 1996
Doyon/Demers Socio-esthéticiens, a site created by two artists ("socio-aestheticians" Doyon and Demers) who received their education in the late eighties, includes information on the artists' previous installations and performances as well as projects designed for the Web. On the one hand, the creators consider the Web as a space for the publication of actions produced outside it (Constructed Situation, Capture Site, among others); on the other, their Web projects direct the results of interactions on the Web away from cyberspace (Centre d'œuvres et œuvres d'art excédentaires, Art en tant qu'art et au delà, etc.). In either case, the projects seem to be deployed in the "wrong place." Describing themselves as "undisciplined and undisciplinarian," the artists show that their works eschew all categorization and that the spaces they invest, whatever they may be, are always at the heart of their critical approach: in particular, their work reexamines the contexts of its creation and dissemination.

Evolving constantly since 1996, the site develops as a place of passage, a transitional space that delocalizes the artistic act and questions the art system and the stability of concepts connected with artwork and its reception. It is subversive work that shares some affinities with the sociological arts and situationism, among others.

An essential aspect of these creations resides in the collaboration of the two artists, the start of a socialization that propagates throughout the community. Their actions, whether taking place on the Web or outside it, aim above all to initiate a dialogue with the audience, to encourage its participation, to extricate the individual from his observer status. The forms and models we are given to fill out and to build are therefore always only a step in the process. The Web is not an end in itself, it is not the object of technological idealization. It is one of many spaces that allow one to reach others and enable the public to take the artistic act in charge.

 

Petra Mueller
The Love Money Weather Project
1996
Petra Mueller's project draws on the variable areas of one's existence - love, money, weather - to establish a relationship with the fluctuating nature of the Web. The Love Money Weather Project suggests that the Web's instability may be compared to the trials and tribulations of one's love life, to the inconstancy of the economy, to the whims of weather, and that it can have an impact on our individual lives as the latter do. The work consists of a journal - updated regularly through 1996 and 1997 - that records day-to-day variations by highlighting weather forecasts, news items, reported conversations, and commentaries on local and international events.

Here, the borderlines between private and public life, between the subjective and the objective, become blurred and interwoven. The narrator's reports, derived from her personal life, mix with textual and visual information that is constantly updated through programmed instructions (chronoscripts, to be precise) that retrieve the data at regular intervals and automatically integrate it into the site. No apparent distinction exists between the author's additions and the machine's, as the site evolves thanks to the data entered by both artist and machine. The Love Money Weather Project makes us reflect on the convergence of private and interpersonal territories, of the individual and the artificial world that he created in this era of new communications technologies.

The work invites us to consider the unstable state of the temporal experience arising from use of the Web. Moreover, the use of webcams in this project intensifies the loss of spatial reference points and prompts us to examine the influence of such devices on our current perception of the world. The Love Money Weather Project invites us to think of the new type of space-time experience resulting from an intimate and constantly renewed association with the machine.

 

Eva Quintas et Michel Lefèvre
Liquidation
January 1998
With Liquidation, Eva Quintas and Michel Lefebvre produced a multimedia fiction shown on several media, especially the Web. At its root, the story relies on photography and text - a photonovel updated to the digital age. Audio files allowed for its broadcast on radio and, on several occasions, a CDROM was projected in exhibition spaces. Making their way through these different incarnations and manifestations, the creators took advantage of the convergence of disciplines in the digital domain to produce a "total work of art" that shares some aspects with cinema.

However, at the time of Liquidation's making - before the advent of the possibilities given today, which make the Web look more and more like television - Web technologies available to artists were more limited. Fully aware of this "poor" environment, the creators of Liquidation adopted the pulp photonovel genre and a humorous tone reminiscent of comic strips. Protagonists' exaggerated expressions, colourful language, texts that function as captions, all evoke movies of the silent film era. The various ingredients rely on emphasis to make up for the medium's all too obvious limitations and to point out that the Web was still a young medium. The work's linear movement brings it closer to film than to the many hypertext experiments published on the Web.

The linearity of the narrative also supports the plot, each page replacing the other, "liquidating" the other. Set in the context of a police investigation, the story affords a humorous perspective on economics, art and entertainment in a society of abundance in which everything is ultimately disposable. By extension, Liquidation - always obsolete because it is constantly renewed - reexamines the universe of the Web.

 

Pascale Trudel
Synchronicité
1998
One could say of Synchronicité, as we have said of work discussed previously, that it takes part in an art of "connection" and is therefore well-suited to the nature of the Web. The connection in this work is with the past and with the family. In this, it resembles the many personal home pages published on the Web. The work also relies on the relationship between the arborescent structures of the Internet and those of the family (genealogical trees).

Old photos are the raw material for this project. The list of multiple choice questions that make up the navigation has the effect of eschewing any hierarchical organization - of creating a synchrony - among the images, suggesting that the associations they trigger are all produced in the undifferentiated space of memory. The dropdown menu, so familiar on Web pages and mostly used in forms, also serves to reveal what is hidden, to express a depth in the surface, to suggest the underside of things. Retouched and reframed to highlight a detail, the photographs acquire the depth of memory. In particular, audio files, always placed at the end of the retrospective and exploratory quest proceeding from each image, invariably have the effect of accentuating the idea of time and of inner resonance.

The photos often represent two (or more) people and therefore already present the image of a relationship, of a connection to be sounded. Duality - the couple as foundation of the family or as connection to the other - is often intensified by an animation (whether by animated GIF or through JavaScript) that "gives new life" to individuals and to the private relations that unite them. JavaScript, still rarely used by artists at the time, allows one to shift images around, to reveal their other side by simply hovering over their surface (mouseOver), expressing a desire for going beyond first appearances.

 

Richard Barbeau
Perec
April 1998
Besides the computer screen, which, on its own, represents a new textual medium, Web technologies have provided unique tools for visualization and spatialization that have lead us to reassess our conceptions of text. Many artists, like Richard Barbeau, wished to exploit the potential of this new textual surface (luminosity, colour, dimension, etc.) and the structural possibilities of text: its modes of appearance, succession, and motion, in short, its deployment in space. Perec puts such conditions of the text's deployment to the test.

Using the means offered by the Web, the work models itself on the challenge presented by George Perec's novel, La disparition, a narrative based on the phenomenal difficulty of telling a story without using the letter e, by far the most ubiquitous letter in the French language. Borrowing from crossword puzzles and Scrabble, Perec presents 25 tables, each of which comprises a sentence that one must reconstitute according to a trajectory that changes with each iteration. The sinuous course taken by the expressions makes their reading and decryption arduous. The work lies in the process itself rather than in solving the enigma as such. Consequently, the search for meaning can only be gradual and will always be partial, as the disorientation to which the reader lends himself is an end in itself. For the artist, as for the writer that inspired him, it is a question of thwarting the rules, of confusing the reader to bring him to a new awareness of language.

Perec suggests that cyberspace offers other types of manifestation and continuity than those given by print. The labyrinthine trajectories taken by the words on the page put the reader face to face with a new context that presents other linearities, other navigational habits. The project's playful aspect highlights the pleasure of discovery and experimentation derived from the new textual possibilities offered in cyberspace.

 

Julie Méalin, Valérie Jodoin et Éric Mattson
Eugénie
March 1998
Several artistic projects on the Web are concerned with recent developments in reproductive technologies and genetics (among well-known examples are those of the Critical Art Ensemble and of Eduardo Kac). Eugénie alludes to eugenics, the science that studies and proposes methods for "improving" the human species. While all creative and cultural domains are inundated with questions arising from scientific "progress," in as much as the latter transforms our conception of the human body and individual identity, the Web proves to be a particularly appropriate space for dealing with these themes - cyberspace is also technological in nature, and fulfills the desire for "reproduction," "cloning," and "procreation" by its ability to address the virtual dimension of the individual, one's extension, double, and presence, imagined and incarnate, in digital space.

With much irony, but also with great efficiency due to its deft mimicry of medical language and environmental structures, Eugenie, the Virtual Laboratory of Artificial Insemination presents visitors with a sperm bank derived from well-known public figures, from which they can then conceive their own progeny. From personal profiles, both of the staff and of the donors, to genealogical trees and demographics, everything is set up to make us believe in the seriousness of the project. In a universe where the individual is summed up by his sperm and its properties(!), by his genetic code, the human being is reduced to data, his personal worth measured by quantities and characteristics. At a time when the body is exaggeratedly idealized, and while all modifications, additions and removals seem permissible, the project brings to light the current excessive desire to control one's body and identity and those of one's descendants.

Finally, the work and its participants afford an interesting "collection," with "connections" (genealogical trees) between the various "contributions," entirely suited to the nature of networked art.

 

David Tomas
The Encoded Eye, the Archive and its Engine House
1998-2000
David Tomas' project presents itself as a book situated in a three-dimensional digital environment occupied by a set of constructed views and spaces, the reader finding himself in a quest for information along a virtual path. Produced in VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language), a technology similar to modelling tools used by architects, the work illustrates the new challenge the visitor faces in locating and retrieving information in the digital era.

With the train engine metaphor, the project also underscores the fact that all Web publication is the object of a negotiation with the "machine" and proceeds directly through it. References to technologies of the industrial era, like railroads, help create a critical perspective on digital technology and establish a relationship between the two periods. The artist, also a professor of media arts and new media, wrote three essays that deal precisely with the transformations resulting from this nineteenth-century mode of transportation and communication. Thus he suggests that similar changes are taking place now, in relation to digital media and the Internet.

The circularity of the two emblematic architectural forms used for structuring the project - the Roundhouse, the first circular hangar designed for storing locomotives, and the Circular Reading Room in the British Museum, both of which were born of the industrial revolution - projects the visitor into a space having no end and no beginning, suggesting the disappearance of such traditional points of reference in the context of digital media.

 

Robert Saucier
Chronique du premier jour
1999
One of the more striking elements of Robert Saucier's work is the relationship between "surface" images and a "background" layer that is initially invisible, but becomes manifest when the cursor hovers over it (mouseOver). Chronique du premier jour uses JavaScript to express the idea of a hidden subtext, buried content, context that is not immediately given. Sweeping over the surface, the spectator has the impression of peeling away fine strips, cutting momentarily into the image, making a break in its continuity, in its integrity. The image constituted afterwards is never the same again; one is aware of a hidden universe, of having woven links between the two levels. It is precisely to this awareness of an underlying environment that Chronique leads the visitor.

Images provided on the surface concern man in relation to technical means of representation, such as photography, or devices for measurement and visualization. They mask fragments of text taken from the media (radio, newspapers, television), several of which, interspersed with news items, deal with scientific advances in the transportation field and with the conquest of space. Excerpted from longer texts, these phrases produce an incoherent whole, the reading of which resembles channel surfing and which, in the end, is scarcely informative. The result is "noise" - the very same noise that emanates from the media, which invade space and lead to incomprehension rather than to the true grasp of the world they claim to provide. The author suggests that the incessant chattering of the media ends up haunting all representation, surreptitiously establishing itself in our perception of the world.

 

Valérie Lamontagne
The Advice Bunny
March 1999 to the present
The Advice Bunny connects with a series of performances in which the artist dresses up as a rabbit and dispenses advice to people. In a sense, the site extends the performances into cyberspace, as it strives for the same goals. While the performances occur on particular occasions, as part of exhibitions and spontaneous or planned contemporary art events (during which the bunny "pops out of the box"), the Web site stands in for the Advice Bunny's "residence," where it can be found at all times, allowing the whimsical being to sustain an active (and interactive) existence.

The project is founded on people's predilection for testing and changing their identity in cyberspace, for experimenting anonymously with role playing. The Advice Bunny suggests that cyberspace is a place of self-invention, of expression, fantasy and transformation. With humour - and the critical distance that accompanies it, the fictional character comes to life in its environment, but it also invites self-questioning and self-creation - the redefinition of who we are.

In this universe, the machine - often perceived as invasive and menacing - gives way to the bunny, at once harmless and wise; in short, welcoming. The work suggests that communications technologies can favour less fleeting, more personal and creative interpersonal relationships, and that self-enquiry comes about through interaction and the availability of the other. The project also suggests that this personal quest can occur in reality, cyberspace constituting a place of transition, for the Advice Bunny as for all those who seek her out.

 

Daniel Dion
Sablier
1999
A frequent preoccupation in Web art is the desire to integrate the organic world - the natural environment in all its forms, and the human being in particular - into an artificial digital environment, sometimes perceived as strange and hostile. References to nature therefore abound in this creative field. Sablier (or hourglass), by Daniel Dion, includes a set of landscapes, a genre that deals precisely with the variously harmonious or conflictual relationship between man and nature. Based on photographs and developed with QuickTime VR technology, the eloquently natural scenes solicit the viewer's accelerated involvement. Horizontal views (QTVR versions 4 and earlier provide 180° panoramas) and the possibility of "moving about" along the same axis are characteristic of the genre. The spectator associates himself with a central point from which the world extends, a position that strongly incites us to question our relation to the represented natural setting.

While this technology gives the illusion of a spatial encompassment and seems to especially rely on the creation of space, the temporal dimension that it helps exploit and reveal turns out to be fundamental. Derived from the QuickTime plugin used for creating and distributing video files, it implies a temporal development, which, as opposed to what occurs in a video, can unfold in either direction. That is precisely what this work is about, as evinced by the title and the starting image, which urges the spectator into a path that is as prospective as it is retrospective. The work concerns the destiny and origin of the individual in the organic world, and the text superimposed on the inverted landscapes forms as many traces of that destiny. The spectator's apprehension of the panoramic images through a constantly changing frame can only be partial. By extension, his comprehension of the metaphysical questions evoked by the work are also partial.

 

Karen Trask
L'Orme (The Elm Tree)
2000
In The Elm Tree, Karen Trask recounts a personal experience: her search for an elm tree during a stroll. When transposed to the Web, where it is sustained by an interactivity that complements the subject, the adventure takes the form of an itinerary and a discovery. The narrative is given in a sound track that ends when the story is told, as any act of speech. Yet, that sound allows for deeper reverberations and helps lead the work into memorial regions. Something remains of the sound, something impalpable and invisible, yet present and active. And it is precisely a question of memory here, of its intangible though persistent character.

Accompanying the sound track and reinforcing the same ideas, the image to be discovered was created from a photograph of the elm and subjected to various manipulations before being integrated into the project; printed twice, it was cut into strips that were then woven together to form two juxtaposed versions, one the reverse of the other. While the processing done on the image endows it with considerable texture, as if to compensate for its distance from the real and to heighten the evocation, the animation (done in Flash) renders it completely ungraspable. Areas discovered by the viewer's trajectory fade away immediately afterward, the search for the image thus taking the form of the stubborn search for the elm recounted in the story. Moreover, the woven image echoes the spectator's weaving of a path in every direction in order to find it. Despite the image's dual nature, it acts as a mirror, and remains as illusive as ever. The inverse of emptiness doesn't correspond to the desired fullness, to a re-materialization, a return to the sought-for origin (the tree). Emptiness finally wins overs, figured by the vacant screen. In this sense, it refers to memory, connected to past content but deprived of concrete manifestation. The effectiveness of the work resides in its awareness of the Web environment, akin to memory, a virtual space, a reservoir whose depth is ungraspable.

 

Brad Todd
Hearing Loss
2000
Brad Todd used the model of an ear, such as is used in acupuncture, as the interface to this work. Just as a needle inserted at a specific spot in the ear creates a stimulus in some part of the body, "touching" an area of the image triggers sounds. The screen surface is compared to a perceptive organ that one can activate. Thus, Todd's project suggests that the computer and the Web resemble the brain and nervous system, a perspective similar to many analogies proposed by artists and theoreticians in new media the last few years.

When the viewer presses on a hot spot, another level of experience is superimposed as fixed or animated images emerge, attaching themselves to the ear, surrounding and covering it. The sounds, in turn, produce images, that is, they produce visual associations. Yet, the many images of all kinds that result from this process are not necessarily connected in an obvious way to the sounds that produce them. The work suggests that the world of sound has an extensive evocative power and that it likely solicits memory in an unpredictable manner. By mousing over or pressing the hot spots, the viewer's trajectory leads to a very rich audiovisual collage. Bringing together touch, hearing, and sight, Hearing Loss tends towards synesthesia.

The work allows one to examine the relationship between surface and depth, between perception and memory. It invites consideration of the audio experience in its reverberative quality, that is, as it reaches both exterior territories (from the computer to the viewer) and interior ones (memory). It leads to a reflection on the location and dislocation of experience in the era of new communications technologies.

 

Les causes perdues in© (Martin Mainguy et Alain-Martin Richard)
L'atopie textuelle est une cause qui se perd
December 2000
L'Atopie textuelle est une cause qui se perd manifests itself on two levels. A monumental sculpture composed of four panels consisting of 476 circular fragments - the discs - serves as the material basis of the project. Distributed to the public, these discs circulate from one person to another and travel by haphazard paths: every time someone participates in the project, he or she donates a digital work (audio, textual, visual). The Web site serves as an anchor and reference point. It collects these productions, bears witness to the paths taken by the discs, and records the collective creation generated by the project.

The initial idea of the community that accepted to take part in the process grows and expands. Exchanges proliferate to form multimedia collages that are published on the Web thanks to the concatenation of data resulting from the disc transfers that take place in reality. Productions develop in the manner of a cadavre exquis, defined by the next addition, whose subject is unpredictable. The project is nourished by delegated content, conceptually fragmentary, its occurrence inscribed in a long semantic chain.

Neither geographic space nor cyberspace suffice to wholly account for this project. Neither is idealized by the initiating artists, who invite us instead to think of them as absolutely complementary. Produced by Alain-Martin Richard - a performance artist and writer - and Martin Mainguy - who works in the area of architecture, design, and installation, L'Atopie textuelle shows an inclination for cross-discipline intersections and for going back and forth between the real and virtual, both in their respective potentialities and in what they can bring to each other. The work is thus an invitation to move from one physical place to another as much as on the Web, and to displace traditional conceptions of art concerning authorship and the finished object.

 

BIOS


Pascale Malaterre
Born in Morocco in 1962, of a Catalan mother and Occitan father. Discovers Quebec at age 6. With solid training in theatre (Conservatoire d'art dramatique, certificate in linguistics, Masters on sound space, post-Masters studies in semiology), she seeks to produce deviant signs, to create techno-industrial rituals that can encounter the Other: performances, installations, poetry, theoretical texts, electro-theatre, video and, since 1995, cyberspace. She took part in residency programs in several multimedia centres in France and Quebec, was finalist for the prestigious Prix Italia in 1992, and was in charge of the video and multimedia section of the Festival du Cinéma Québécois de Blois, from 1991 to 1996. Now converses with 3D entities - monstrous, of course.

Frédérick Belzile
Frédérick Belzile lives in Montreal. She works with electronic media: video and audio installations, interactive media, the Web, among others. She is now completing an interactive CD-ROM that should be available by year's end. Dreamed.org is her only Web project.

Doyon/Demers
Doyon/Demers, formed in 1987, consists of the undisciplinarians - not bound to a single discipline, and undisciplined - Hélène Doyon and Jean-Pierre Demers. As such, they have produced many actions, maneuvers, performances and events in which the willing citizen may be seen as both material and dispersed author. As socio-aestheticians - their action aims to explore socio-professional connections and to create situations conducive to relationships between individuals, they attempt to epiphanize the everyday in the context of aesthetic experiences that explore the relationship with the other, by way of chance encounters or in micro-communities of similar affinities, contexts and interests. In other words, their interventions are expressed between the work of art and something else, in the grey zones that are at once connected with the domain of art and, in actuality, identified with the community aesthetic that gave birth to them, whether in extended, real, or virtual modes of expression. Hailing from Saint-Raymond de Portneuf, Quebec, they are now enrolled in Université du Québec à Montréal's doctoral program in Art Studies and Practices. They both received a Masters in Creative Arts from the same university and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They also benefited from residency programs at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, and the International Video Art Summer School in Eztergom, Hungary.

Eva Quintas and Michel Lefebvre
Michel Lefebvre: Author Michel Lefebvre has always preferred the multidisciplinary distribution of his work: readings, publications, radio, exhibitions and, now, multimedia. Since 1994, he's been working on the photonovel Liquidation, in its many forms: book, radio, Internet, CD-ROM. He also produces Web sites for cultural organizations and institutions. He first worked with Eva Quintas in 1990, with Portraits/Potins d'artistes montréalais(e)s, a radio text coupled with a photographic exhibition presented in Montreal and Mexico City.

Eva Quintas
As a photographer, Quintas has exhibited in Quebec and abroad since 1990. In 1997, she plunged into Web creation, producing several projects and writing cultural cyber-features. She is coordinator of the photographers' collective, Fovea, and founder of Agence TOPO, an art organization concerned with the convergence of photography, literature, and multimedia.

Pascale Trudel
Pascale Trudel, composer and multimedia artist, particularly interested in cyberspace, was born in Quebec in 1964. Since 1986, her work (music and/or Web art) have appeared in America (North and South), in Europe, in concert, on radio, on CDs, in art galleries and museums, and on the Internet. In Montreal, in 2000-2001, her new electroacoustic work Soleil qui inonde mes mains was played during the Rien à voir (8) concert, as part of the SuperMicMac festival at the Musée d'art contemporain, and she produced Constellations, a Web installation for Les HTMlles, Studio XX's cyberart festival, at the Cinémathèque québécoise.

Julie Méalin, Valérie Jodoin, and Éric Mattson
Julie Méalin
Julie Méalin has a passion for issues concerning new reproductive technologies. She began by developing Eugénie, a critique of the eugenicist agenda in artificial insemination, then, in a similar vein, distributed a man's sperm in a zoo, in Germany, as part of the Menschenpark exhibition. She is currently working on an animated film.

Valérie Jodoin
Valérie Jodoin is a graduate in computer engineering at the École Polytechnique de Montréal. She is actively interested in the development of bio-medical technologies and in related ethical questions. She intends to pursue studies in the bio-robotics field.

Richard Barbeau
Richard Barbeau studied visual arts at University of Ottawa (1980-1983), and art history at Université de Montréal (1985-1989). He then practised his art (sculpture and video). As of 1997, he works exclusively with the Web. Barbeau also published a number of theoretical and critical articles and interviews for the online magazines Archée and Chair et métal. He lives in Montreal and teaches art history and digital art at the Collège de Sherbrooke, Quebec.

Petra Mueller
Born in Berlin, Petra Mueller lives in Montreal and is currently completing a doctorate in communication studies (University of Concordia). Exploring the diverse supports and forms of narrative structure, she presented At the Station, Stationary, Berlin Alexanderplatz to Sony City as part of the exhibition The Modernist Document, together with Stan Douglas, Catherine Opie, Charles Gagnon, and Moyra Davey (Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, 1999) and The Tightrope Walker (Ace Art, Winnipeg, 1995). For the series Trilogie Urbaine she co-authored the book Piercing together with the playwright Larry Tremblay (Dazibao, Montreal, 1999). Her work was included in the exhibitions Fuite et Repaire (Dazibao, Montreal, 1996), Noise in the Dark (Galerie 303, Montreal, 1996), Drawing and Activism (Saw Video, Ottawa, 1995), and the electronic art festivals Manifestation internationale vidéo et art électronique (Champ Libre, Montreal, 1997), Maid in Cyberspace Web Art Festival (Studio XX, Montreal, 1997), and Spring Breakup, A Festival of Canadian Web Art (InterAccess, Toronto, 1997). The Web site, The Love Money Weather Project was produced in 1996.

David Tomas
David Tomas is an artist whose multimedia and photographic works explore the cultures and transcultures of imaging systems. He has exhibited in Canada, the United States and Europe. In 1994-95 he was appointed Mellon Fellow at the California Institute of the Arts and in 1997 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Tomas is the author of two books: Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings (1996) and an internet book entitled The Encoded Eye, the Archive, and its Engine House (1998-2000) that has recently been published on-line as a research e-book by the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech (http://www.cddc.vt.edu/encodedeye/). He has also written articles on the cultures of imaging systems, the history of cybernetics, cyborgs, and contemporary art practices. He is currently working on a series of drawings and a collection of essays (forthcoming in 2002) that explore deviant approaches to the history of new media. Tomas also teaches multimedia and interactive art in the visual arts department at Université du Québec à Montréal.

Robert Saucier
Coming from Edmundston, New Brunswick, Saucier has lived and worked in Montreal since 1974. He has exhibited his works in 15 or so solo exhibitions and in about 30 group exhibitions during the last 20 years. Since 1985, a variety of devices and electronic components (motion detectors, timers, relays, etc.) have become an integral part of his work. For several years, whether as raw material or as conceptual reference, he has used photovoltaic cells, commonly known as solar collectors, with various types of light sources, as well as radio transistors and recordings on magnetic tape or CD. Particular attention is given to major communications channels (radio, television, Internet, etc.) and to their invasion of our physical and intellectual space. While they are quite different from each other, the resulting works share some characteristics: detected by a photo-electric cell, the viewer's movement triggers motorized mechanisms or audio devices. It amplifies the magic of the underlying technology, but also reveals the futility of some utilizations. Chance and exhilaration are ever present in these controlled environments.

Karen Trask
Karen Trask was born in Fergus, Ontario, in 1954, and completed her undergraduate studies in visual arts at the University of Waterloo in 1978. She subsequently moved to Québec City where she became an active member of the printmaking studio, Engramme, for many years. She gradually became interested in the sculptural possibilities of hand made paper. Her sculptures often integrated lithography and cast paper. In 1995, she moved to Montréal to continue her studies in art. She graduated with a Masters Degree in Sculpture from Concordia University in 1999. She continues to work with paper in its various forms. Writing and video have also become more present in her current work. She has received several awards for my work, including the Paper Prize, at La Biennale du dessin, de l'estampe et du papier, once in 1989 and once in 1997.

Valérie Lamontagne
Valérie Lamontagne is a Montréal artist, freelance art critic and curator. Using various media such as the Web, drawing, painting, installation, photography and performance, her work explores popular, sentimental and kitsch imagery within contemporary art practices. Her Advice Bunny performance has been featured across Canada at: Plein Sud (2000), Hamilton Artists Inc. (2000), Pitt Gallery (1999) and the Concordia Bourget Gallery (1999). Her most recent exhition/performace The Snow Flake Queen was presented this past April at Truck Gallery in Calgary as well as at the Torre de los Vientos in Mexico City with the Ramble artist collective. Her upcoming projects include a performance entitled Mermaid to be presented in the context of the Visualeyez event organized by Latitude53 in Edmonton, Alberta as well as a live webcast event, The Advice Bunny Talkshow, to be produced and presented in collaboration with Oboro Gallery in Montréal.

Ms. Lamontagne regularly writes about new media and performance in publications such as: Parachute, Archée, Rhizome and the Magazine Électronique du CIAC. She organized the Maid in Cyberspace Web Festival (2000) at Studio XX, a women's digital media center. Her upcoming curatorial projects include Location/Dislocation, a net.art exhibition presented in the context of the Saison du Québec à New York curated in collaboration with Sylvie Parent. She is a co-founder of MobileGaze (http://www.mobilegaze.com) a net.art site featuring art and interviews with artists and digital media producers and is preparing an on-line exhibition entitled Matter and Memory.

Daniel Dion
Daniel Dion has worked in video, photography, installation, and new media for twenty years. He presented his work in solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada (1993), the Centre international d'art contemporain (1994), the Vancouver Art Gallery (1983), and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (1989), among others. Sablier was presented in the electronic arts section of the Biennale de Montréal 2000. As co-founder and co-director of Oboro in Montreal, a contemporary art exhibition and production centre, Dion designed and organized many events since 1983. His Web site showcases many projects.

Brad Todd
Brad Todd studied at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary and completed an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 1993. He has worked and exhibited with a number of media and now focuses almost exclusively on digital mediums. Todd has shown his net.art works internationally at such venues as ISEA 2000 in Paris, INFOS 2000 in Ljubjana, Slovenia, and the FCMM 2000 in Montreal. He is also co-founder of the on-line journal MobileGaze.

Les Causes perdues in©
Les Causes perdues in© consist of Martin Mainguy and Alain-Martin Richard, accompanied in their improbable projects by a multitude of stunning supporters and poets who do all they can to inject poetry into reality. This fellowship enjoys inventing "causes" sustained by paradox and risk-taking. Once it has set up a vigorous system within a ubiquitous structure, no cause can be completely lost. It has concrete reality in each of its components, but is never complete as a finished object. The losing cause is reified in movement and circulation. The genesis of this project is a fine example: les causes perdues in© came up with this project during a series of chance encounters at their head office, i.e., on the bus seats of route 7 in Quebec City.

Martin Mainguy
Martin Mainguy is a practitioner of architecture and design, and a researcher of the imagination. A professor in the art department at Cégep Ste-Foy for several years, he has practised in several professional contexts related to applied arts: as artisan, in exhibition design and scenography, as interior decorator, in architecture and urban design. Motivated by unbridled reflections on art, creation, and society, his inquiry gravitates around methods for making poetry and playfulness present and tangible in a constructed space. He also produced some thematic exhibitions/installations on the city, including À la recherche d'un centre-ville in 1993, La Ville Idéale in 1994, and Tour de Ville in 1998.

Alain-Martin Richard
Over the years, performer, editor, critic and essayist Alain-Martin Richard has developed a multidisciplinary practice on questions of art in society, on the practice of art as poetic phenomenon, as a philosophy in the making. Experimentation with practices unrelated to art, the use of unmodified everyday materials, the use of technologies as a familiar medium and, especially, the objective conditions of artistic experimentation sustain the greater part of his production. He planned and organized such events as Le Marathon d'écriture, in 1983, and the Amos Symposium in 1997; he presented several non-iterative performances on space, movement, velocity, identity, and individual responsibility in a world marked by postmodernism and the trivialization of all parameters. Was a member of The Nomads and of the Inter/Le Lieu collective.