INTERVIEW SERIES: Curatorial Dialogues 01: Curating the Age of Algorithms INTERVIEWERS: Gokhan Colak & Ipek Yeginsu INTERVIEWEE: Nathalie Bachand

From “Digital Art” to a Post-Digital Condition

You have worked for many years at the intersection of digital technology and contemporary art, while also questioning the very terminology we use—digital art, media art, new media art, and perhaps even the necessity of these distinctions. Today, digital technologies are no longer confined to a specific artistic field; they are embedded in everyday life, infrastructures, economies, bodies, and social relations. Do you think we have entered a post-digital condition in which the category of “digital art” itself needs to be reconsidered? What, in your view, distinguishes contemporary digital art from art that simply uses digital technologies as a tool?

What we call digital art, and its different appellation following time, is something that is in constant movement: it’s moving and changing along with every technological development, it always been. It was already the case in the 1960s when the Bell Labs in New Jersey and New York started to welcome artists in residency, in order to experiment with their technologies, and somehow also learning from these experimentations, and integrating them as part of their own research; and even in the 1950s with the Independent Group in London, working with telecommunication technologies; also in the 1950s in Germany with some electronic music studio; and let’s just think of the theremin invented in 1920 by Leon Theremin in Russia, and how it influenced avant-garde musicians. So what I mean is, it doesn’t “need” to be reconsidered because it’s reconsidering itself in real time, in the making, along the way to say so, siding with all and every technological developments that becomes available over time. And that’s something truly engaging about digital art: it consequently always says something about how we actually experience the world in the present time. It’s questioning reality in a way no other art form does. Moreover, it’s often even “acting” on reality, filtering, modifying our view of the world in a very concrete and tangible way.

I would say that the fact that we’re now in the post-digital era doesn’t change much to the status of digital art within the contemporary art milieu: despite the omnipresence of digital technologies in our everyday life—and the fact that some institutions are more proactive than others, think of the Whitney Museum with the artport, its early Internet art portal launched in 2001—, it’s still considered as a different category than more traditional art forms, they’re not equally present in the global art milieu. And it certainly has to do with a certain number of aspects: its relative complexity and the fact that it has to “function”; the cost of equipment acquisition and of running digital technologies on many weeks or months; the technological expertise it requires to install and maintain; the mediation expertise to meet the audiences; also the fact that media or digital artworks are putted quite often on the same level as entertainment projects produced by cultural industries (for-profit structures), mostly in the public space context. In this sense, there’s still a lot to do for its recognition in our now post-digital time-space.

Then to answer the second part of the question: for me, “art that simply uses digital technologies as a tool” is a tricky statement. Of course there is photography and video, which are artistic practices in their own right, using digital technology without (necessarily) belonging to the realm of digital art (while sometimes they do). In my view, the tool is part of the process and it’s somehow embedded in the work. That being said, there’s of course a plurality of approaches to digital art, from 3D animation and images, like in the work of Québec artists Sabrina Ratté, Nelly-Eve Rajotte, Julie Tremble, Baron Lanteigne or François Quévillon; to a more material use of technology like in the installation work of other Québec artists, Diane Landry, Diane Morin, Marie-Ève Levasseur, Katherine Melançon and Projet EVA—just to mention a few different ranges of digital perspectives and technological embodiments, from the screen to the space. But actually, as a curator, I don’t work with the mindset of “contemporary digital art” because I don’t exclusively work with technology. When I integrate an oil painting in an exhibition about the Internet, this painting becomes part of the conversation, and that’s this conversation about the technology that matters, not the technology itself.

The Dead Web: What Does It Mean for the Web to Die?

Your curatorial project The Dead Web – The End began with the speculative possibility of the collapse of the World Wide Web and asked what might remain after such a collapse. The project was initially presented in Montréal in 2017 and subsequently travelled internationally, taking on different geographical and institutional contexts. Almost a decade later, the question of a “dead web” seems to have acquired a different meaning. Rather than imagining the disappearance of the Internet, we are now confronted with platform monopolies, algorithmic infrastructures, AI-generated content, surveillance, misinformation, digital exhaustion, and the increasing commercialization of online space. Has the Web already become “dead” in a cultural or political sense—even though it remains technologically alive?

Indeed, I definitely answer yes to that question. The Web is now an infinite trap made of smaller traps, a corporate capitalistic mega matrix trap for the most of it, lying to us in broad daylight, behind the tiniest veil any fool ever had to look through—yet here we are, me the first. I mean, it’s quite difficult to envision a life without the Internet, despite how toxic it is now. And it’s definitely the actual version of Plato’s cavern made real, in real time, laying on the surface of the screen. Have you seen the video essay artwork New Extractivism (2020) by artist and academic Vladan Joler?

That’s it, that’s exactly what we’re going through, willingly and obediently, every single day for many years now. And in this light, it’s true that my exhibition project called The Dead Web, [with artworks by: Baron Lanteigne & Dominique Sirois, Julien Boily, Frédérique Laliberté, Projet EVA, Julie Tremble, Format C], first initiated by me almost ten years ago—and afterward consistently supported and produced abroad by a Québec structure named Molior, a very precious and incredibly professional support that I want to underline—is now outdated, so to speak. Its recent presentation at KONTEJNER in Zagreb made me realize how far we went from 2017.

The last time it was presented was in 2020, at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. It opened in January, just before the pandemic, and at that time we were still far from generative AI invading our daily lives, right? And I don’t think that it’s bold to state that generative AI dived the Internet in a quite dystopian state—did Gibson write about it? I hope he will, if not yet. So the Web changed a lot, and the exhibition must be understood like a “picture” of diverse states of mind in a pre-AI Internet world: it doesn’t reflect on this aspect, but it also somehow underlines it by its absence. Plus it suggests a space of resistance, a space where something is still happening outside of generative AI—I think we need that: not to forget how the world can be. Actually I started to work on this exhibition more than 10 years ago now, in 2015, and the spark came from some headlines I’ve came across, and that were sprawling in the media about the possibility of an Internet Capacity Crunch, discussed in the context of a Royal Society scientific symposium—which was of course, quite a surprising news to read, in a world where we’re not questioning the presence of the Internet—a reality where we just take it for granted. From there I developed the exhibition with, in mind, all these speculative scenarios involving the disappearance of the Internet, its dysfunction and how it could end up, how it could evolve into something else, or what would it reveal through its own entropic process. The exhibition reflects about the disappearance of the Internet, and offers perspectives unpacking our idea of the Web and its absence. But it also questions, in a broader sense, what a meaningful loss might mean. I guess, the idea of entropy is really at the heart of this project.

Which leads me to think about this AI cannibalism theory that might result in collapses of AI models. Hope I’ll have the opportunity to present a 6 th iteration of The Dead Web and then include an artwork that speaks about that phenomenon. But also, just to briefly come back to the idea of resistance: there was this artwork by Croatian artists in the KONTEJNER iteration from Dina Gligo and Vedran Gligo, a duo named Format C—actually Molior initiated this brilliant idea to include local artists in the exhibition when presented abroad—, this very geeky DIY web-based artwork Pivilion/EXEno1: TOGETHERTOGETHER (2021-2026), where actually the web “exist” outside the commercial territory where it seems to belong. However it doesn’t, that’s what we tend to forget: things can always be different if we really want them to be, but action is required and political decisions would certainly help. The fact that it’s “technologically alive” as you wrote—I love the formulation—is both a chance and a curse: something can be done but also, something has to be done or it will “do” us.

Data, Hyperconnection and the Politics of Attention

Your exhibition DataffectS examined telecommunications, hyperconnection, digital interference, technological excess, and the ways in which digital media affect our perception of reality. Today, data is not merely something produced by our interaction with technology; it actively shapes what we see, what we desire, what becomes visible, and even what forms of knowledge are considered legitimate. How do you understand the relationship between datafication and contemporary art? Can artistic practice genuinely challenge the logic of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic attention, or does the art world itself risk becoming another space in which data is commodified?

I think both situations are actually happening at the same time. Data is now commodified everywhere, in every world, the art world comprised. There’s a substantial part of the art world that submits to capitalism: there’s market logic, there’s also some pressure for institutions to make it profitable, to sell entrance tickets for example. But also, is there something left uncommodified at the moment? I don’t want to be dark but being realistic might be the wisest posture. Then yes, there’s also room for art to challenge the tangential direction we’re heading to. And in order to challenge, there’s a wide range of strategies digital art can deploy, thanks to appropriate misappropriations of technological tools: transmitting, calculating, projecting, hacking, programming.

The idea is always to reveal and give ways for the viewer to examine reality under different perspectives. I can’t help but thinking about the iconic Hacking Monopolism Trilogy artworks, by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, with Google Will Eat Itself (2005), Amazon Noir (2006) and Face to Facebook (2011), where technology is actually used against itself, creating processual situations and paradoxical encounters between the works and the audience. These are the types of activations that can challenge the state of things. I’m also thinking about furtive algorithmic hacking type of work, like HYPE, SCAM (How You Produce Eternity, Soft Collisions Amongst Machines) (2025) by Montreal artist Adam Basanta, where a deceptive infiltration of curated bot-accounts on Instagram allowed him to question the commercial art world logic. Then as part of DataffectS [with artworks by: Cécile Babiole, LAb[au], Julie Morel, Rodolfo Peraza, Robert Saucier, Véronique Savard, Dominique Sirois, Mathieu Zurstrassen], which you mentioned, there was this cleverly funny artwork by Belgian artist Mathieu Zurstrassen, I Love You / I Hate You TDS* (Trump Derangement Syndrom / impartiality Bot) (2018), where cooked rice was submitted on one side to Donald Trump’s tweets (indeed, a pre-X artwork), then on the other the Love Quotes account tweets. It’s a reinterpretation of “The Rice Experiment” by self-proclaimed “Doctor” Masaru Emoto, where the “loved” rice stays intact, while the “hated” one turns black.

Data in these examples are really used as materials, while the social media interfaces are catalyzed as spaces where generative content keeps feeding the artworks. Then as an offline strategy, I want to mention the artwork Marmelade (2013-2026) by Chicoutimi-based Colombian-born artist Paolo Almario: a robotic self-destructive installation project through which the artist consistently denunciate the literal political violence towards his father and family—this project is part of Ars Electronica this year, then will also be part of the Chroniques Biennial in Marseille in October, I highly recommend to do a little detour.

The relationship between datafication and contemporary art is certainly one of many contradictions, much like the art world itself. But at least there’s potentiality to act and room for experiment within this relationship. And indeed, as you say “it actively shapes what we see, what we desire, what becomes visible, and even what forms of knowledge are considered legitimate”, and this is very disturbing. What’s even more disturbing is certainly that it does so, without us noticing—I mean, people are busy paying the rent or the mortgage, it’s alarmingly difficult to pay attention to this datafication of the world we are collectively experiencing, even less resisting it. If there’s artists willing to be actively critical about it, it really is an unaware chance we have.

Curating Technologies That Are Constantly Changing

A conventional artwork can often be preserved through physical conservation, documentation, or archival practices. Digital and media artworks are considerably more unstable: software becomes obsolete, hardware disappears, operating systems change, online platforms shut down, and technological standards become inaccessible. What does it mean to curate and preserve an artwork whose material conditions are constantly changing? Should the curator attempt to preserve the original technological experience, or should technological obsolescence itself become part of the artwork’s meaning?

To curate artworks that change over time means adapting, being flexible and open to new possibilities. I’m spontaneously thinking of Frédérique Laliberté’s case for the last iteration of The Dead Web in Zagreb. Her previous artwork—the one that has been shown in the four previous diffusions—happened to “die”, quite literally, since the last exhibition in 2020. It was a web-based work and, for different reasons, the domain hasn’t been renewed in time.

At some point, she was receiving these “final notice” messages by the host, and she decided to register them. At that moment, we didn’t know the exhibition would have been presented again—more than five years passed in between—so she also started to experiment some sort of compression with the fake papier mâché hard drives, which were the sculptural elements of the installation, also because the integrated electronics in these pieces were not working anymore. All this resulted in the material disintegration of the initial work. So she suggested to create a new work from these remnants—including the “final notice” recordings as sound elements—, as a logical progression of the narrative where the technological components meets their final destination and the web actually die, hence the new artwork called Infinistime.com: FINAL NOTICE (2026), a reflection about our agency towards technological obsolescence and its direct consequence: electronic waste accumulation. This whole process was also about accepting that an artwork might not live forever: everything eventually dies or disintegrates, disappears—why would it be different with art?

Otherwise, from my perspective, that’s a conversation that has to happen between the artists and the preservation experts, in order to work on a long term vision. I think however that both approaches are valid. I would even say that in an ideal world, we’d get to experience the artwork through both these preservation lenses: in order to see how the hardware obsolescence may transform the work; then also to see how much the hardware must be modified to keep the effect intact, what migrations or emulations must be done—to see what’s the path in terms of historical course, in between the time the artwork was initially created and the moment it’s been shown again. In some cases the hardware is as important as the effect itself, it may play a significant visual role basically impossible to replace; it may also enable a specific process which is essential to activate the work. In my view, the technology being part of an artwork’s DNA, the hardware is never a detail. However, maybe you know about the The Variable Media Approach project, initiated in 1998 by Jon Ippolito at the Guggenheim, and then supported in 2003 by the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montreal through a publication: Permanence Through Change. This approach is about keeping the behavioral characteristics of the work, instead of preserving the hardware. It also gives the artists the responsibility to define this behavior and the different formats, whether it’s an installation or performance. It really was one of the very first research initiatives in this specific field. Beside the ZKM in Karlsruhe, there wasn’t much happening around the questions of media arts preservation in the early 2000s.

Besides, the curator has also a meaningful role to play in this question of preservation and it’s through writing. Art writing contributes in an indirect way to the preservation process: through texts, artworks’ existence extend in time and space; its existence is articulated in the parallel world of language. I’m jumping on the occasion to mention a project I’m currently working on, together with Alessandro Ludovico from the Neural magazine and archive: a Temporary Library of Québec Media Arts printed publications is currently in the making. It’s a series he initiated in 2017, and since there’s Temporary Libraries that have been constituted in Colombia, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark and Norway, resulting in curated collections of media arts publications which can be accessed and consulted through the different organizations that permanently host them afterwards. Here in Montréal, the collection will be presented during the ELEKTRA Biennale next October—a co-curation by Lynn Hughes and Ida Toft, on theme of art game—, then Artexte will welcome the collection in a permanent way and on an archival level, as well as the Neural Archive in Italy—so the Québec collection will also exist in Europe. One of the ideas behind this project is actually to preserve memory and history of media arts timelines in different parts of the world. Printed publications are proven to be more durable than digital formats, which gives them an especially significant status in the knowledge ecology.

Immersion, Virtual Reality and the Question of Reality

New Surroundings: Approaching the Untouchable brings together virtual-reality works, video and installations, engaging with questions around environments and forms of experience that are difficult or impossible to access directly. The project has subsequently travelled through different Canadian and European contexts. What happens to our understanding of reality when artistic experience is mediated through immersive technologies? Does VR simply create an illusion of presence, or can it produce a different epistemological relationship with space, body, memory and environment? More broadly, what can immersive art make us perceive that conventional visual representation cannot?

It definitely produces a different epistemological relationship to space. Authors in the publication Molior is publishing about this exhibition project—to be launched in October—Aurélie Besson, Molior’s Director, and Lisa Tronca, one of the writers, are extensively developing around that question. Then indeed, it’s important to mention that this exhibition was entirely produced by Molior, who invited me to curate. As one might imagine, virtual reality (VR) artworks require important financial resources and technological expertise to be realized. Another significant aspect of this project I want to mention is that we exclusively worked with independent Québec artists: no studios are part of the project. It was essential for us to make this project an opportunity for artists who don’t work in a “for profit” mode, unlike many studios producing VR experiential documentaries for example. So, indeed, as you suggest, our understanding of reality is shifting for a moment. But in the case of the New Surroundings artworks [by: Baron Lanteigne, Caroline Gagné, François Quévillon, Laurent Lévesque & Olivier Henley, Olivia McGilchrist, Sabrina Ratté, Natacha Clitandre], really immerse ourselves in complete digital artistic proposals in the sense that there’s no “trying to imitate” reality or nature. The environments that surround us are 3D animations or photogrammetry-based processes exclusively—there’s no realistic depictions working on creating an illusion of reality here. Our relation to space is affected because the whole body is solicited, often required to move in order to activate the work, but our disbelief isn’t suspended. However, the fact that VR induces movements, also means that it influences our perceptive modes: it actually activates a whole range of apprehension of the environment, and this experiential encounter with art can truly unlock new ways to see and think the world.

For example, Floralia (2021) by Sabrina Ratté, which is part of the exhibition, is reflecting on the idea of preserving nature through a collection of specimens. The viewer can go through plants and flowers and somehow “enter” them, and experience their fragmentation floating all around in a state of antigravity. It’s about feeling the surroundings differently, seeing it under different lenses. In a similar mindset of collecting specimens, The Conservatory: Other Horizon (2017-2022) by Laurent Lévesque and Olivier Henley, is exploring a strictly digital type of “nature”: the one we find in video games. Through hacking techniques, they extracted files of plants from first-person shooter video games made between 1998 and 2017—enhancing the relationship between the destructive vibes driving these games and the fragile state of our natural environments—, and thus collecting nearly 270 plants in the same spirit as botanical gardens would do. The experience of the viewer is to be immersed in a growing jungle of video game plant specimens, proliferating all around until the garden is reset. Then just to mention a last one, Autofading_Se disparaître (2020) from Caroline Gagné is really a one-of-its-kind VR proposal: unlike most VR artwork, it requires quietness, immobility and silence, in order to let the nature appear around the viewer. Going completely against the spectacular style VR has gotten us used to, her work awakens an awareness of our surroundings in a way art rarely does—and immersion allows this to happen. It’s quite a radical artwork actually.

In terms of format, Molior faced quite a challenge with this project. Since the very beginning the idea was to create an entirely immersive experience for the viewer: there would be no change of headset in between artworks but rather a smooth passage from one to the other by staying in a virtual space that gathered them together similarly to an exhibition space—even the curatorial statement and the artwork’s description are integrated in this virtual environment. However we didn’t want to recreate the classical white box. To stay coherent with the whole curatorial vision, we decided to commission the creation of a 3D environment evocative of a natural space, which completely assumes its digital nature.

Another specificity about the format is the modular dimension of the scenography—conceived by the Montreal design studio La Camaraderie—allowing to adapt the exhibition in basically any type of space. It can be shown with the initial six headsets, but also with only one if the space is very small, facilitating the tour of the project. And in case the space is a wide one, there’s six artistic proposals besides the VR artworks which were accompanying the very first diffusion of the exhibition: installations; 3D animations; videos; and even pictorial pieces—all of them resonating with the VR proposals, as extensions in the physical world.

Digital Art and Its Impact on the Environment

Digital art is often perceived as immaterial, yet its production, storage, and circulation depend on physical infrastructures with significant environmental costs. While scholars such as John Charles Ryan have emphasized the potential of digital art to foster ecological awareness, artists and researchers such as Tega Brain have drawn attention to the material and environmental infrastructures underlying digital technologies. How do you view this tension between digital art’s ecological potential and its environmental footprint? To what extent should ecological considerations shape artistic and curatorial practices in the digital sphere?

Indeed, that’s the great paradox and contradiction of digital art: being critical of its own matrix. But that’s also—in my view—its best casting: we need art that points towards technological issues regarding the environment. Of course ecological footprint is a very concrete reality, and it comes somehow from all directions. Pretty much any capitalistic-driven thing of the world has a significant ecological footprint. To be alive has a meaningful footprint actually. It’s not to minimize the digital art responsibilities regarding the environment, but we certainly must acknowledge our own personal contradictions too. We do the organic recycling and the paper one, and glass, etc. And then, we drive to work and send emails all day long, ask Gemini, Claude or ChatGPT for many little things, because it’s so convenient (as a French speaking native, I’m constantly using DeepL when writing in English)—within just a few years, these became our everyday life tools, and they make a huge difference. So indeed, digital art critical of the technological environmental footprint is a contradiction, and so is an average life in 2026.

You’re mentioning Tega Brain and it spontaneously reminds me of the collaborative project she worked on, Asunder (2019), together with Julian Oliver and Bengt Sjölén, which was part of transmediale 2019. A meaningful installation artwork where an algorithmic agent is in charge of proposing solutions to keep the planet safe, while a custom 144 CPU supercomputer runs a three screen projection showing models and visualizations from the recommendations in reaction to the CESM climate model predictions. Funny enough—or not?—the solutions aren’t necessarily realistic or even possible, like to displace a country, or an ocean, elsewhere. Should we worry about discovering that what should be done isn’t possible? In any case, we certainly should be aware of it—and it’s art coupled to technology that can do that. That’s also why—to me—digital art is interesting when critical (and not merely an impressive effect animating the public space), or at least when conveying a reflection about the very issues it contributes to create. It can be in a fun way, don’t get me wrong, but still: to express something critical is more important than ever now. In this sense, it can be a productive tension between, as you wrote, “digital art’s ecological potential and its environmental footprint”.

Women in Digital Art

In Women, Art, and Technology, Judy Malloy draws attention to the central role women have played in the development of new media art, while also highlighting the historical lack of recognition and documentation of their contributions. Artist and researcher Cornelia Sollfrank, meanwhile, has critically explored questions of gender, authorship, and power within digital culture. Against this background, how would you describe the position of women in today’s digital art landscape? Has the expansion of digital media created new opportunities for women artists, or do you see existing gender inequalities being reproduced in new technological contexts?

The role and place of women has been quite a dismissed one historically speaking—not only in art and technology and in the art world in general but also globally speaking, “humankindly” speaking. There is still a huge global, historical, catch up to do with how women are treated and perceived. In the digital art field—as in pretty much any field actually—, they’ve been erased in many ways: silenced, unmentioned, uncredited, ignored. Historically, patriarchy just took all the room it could, and it still does a lot: it’s somehow embedded within generational and cultural patterns and internalized misogyny. It’s even regressing in many countries—just think of the United States right now with anti-abortion laws in some states, to give the most obvious example. Then again, in digital art it’s definitely better than it ever was, but the boys club still exists in the art and technology milieu.

Your question makes me think about this amazing art and literary project called Wikifémia by Roberte la Rousse, a cyberfeminist collective that comes together around artistic and critical projects exploring the themes of the French language, gender, and technology (networks, algorithms, computer science). The collective was founded in 2016 by Cécile Babiole, a visual/digital artist, and Anne Laforet, a researcher in information and communication sciences. So Wikifémia (2022) is a printed publication that presents biographies of remarkable women: from suffragists to women who defied the ban on wearing pants, from human calculators to video game developers, from medieval gynecologists to today’s science fiction writers—thus reclaiming credit and authorship. These stories are organized around excerpts from Wikipedia articles, annotated in the form of critical notes, and written in a language that subverts dominant discourses. Roberte la Rousse has conceived a radical project to abolish gender in language and expresses herself “in French,” that is, entirely “in the feminine form.” It also reflects on the necessary demasculinization of language and knowledge by raising awareness of the invisibility of women in the French language, and presents feminist counterarguments.

Then, just to give a quick closer answer to the question: I would say that the position of women in today’s digital art landscape is an empowered one compared to whatever it was before, but it’s not enough. Did the expansion of digital media create new opportunities for women artists? Yes. But so did it for men artists too. Gender inequalities are obviously still being reproduced in most milieux, most countries, most generations—if not regressing as I mentioned above, unfortunately. We definitely need concrete gestures, activations and projects like the Wikifémia one, that leaves traces in the world.

New Geographic Frontiers: The Gulf Region

In your review of the exhibition Art Must Be Artificial: Perspectives of AI in the Visual Arts, you describe Diriyah Art Futures as the first center dedicated to digital art and new technologies in the MENA region, bringing together exhibition-making, research, education, and artistic production. Based on your experience there, how do you view the rapidly developing digital art landscape in Saudi Arabia and, more broadly, the Gulf region? Do you see Saudi Arabia and the UAE emerging as new global centers for digital art? If so, what might distinguish their trajectories from those of more established art centers in Europe and North America?

Unfortunately, I can’t answer that question: I’ve been there for less than 48h. And it’s the only time in my life I went to this region. It was an invitation to write a review for the opening of the Diriyah Art Futures and its inaugural exhibition Art Must Be Artificial: Perspectives of AI in the Visual Arts. As I wrote in this review, the exhibition “is the result of a collaboration between curator Jérôme Neutres, a major loan of works from the Guy” Myriam Ullens Foundation’s Computing Art collection, and works by Saudi artists, including commissioned pieces. In total, some fifty works by thirty-one artists make up this major exhibition, which highlights the role of technology in the development of artistic practices from the 1960s to the present day.” From what I’ve seen, it’s a very promising digital art hub and exhibition center, with residencies and educational programs at its core.

Art and Curating: Two Forms of Creative Practice and Their Boundaries

You received your Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts, but your professional identity came to center on curatorial practice. Deborah Pearson describes the latter as a creative act of context-building that comes close to, without necessarily constituting, an artistic endeavor in itself. Given your artistic training and your experience as a curator working across various media, how do you view the relationship between artistic and curatorial practice? Can curatorial practice be considered a form of art? If not, where do the two diverge?

I wouldn’t say that curating is a form of art, I don’t see it this way, not for me. But indeed there is a creative dimension in this sort of “orchestration”, through which an exhibition is coming together. There is a creative part in the conceptualization of a group exhibition especially—while solo exhibition projects, most of the time, are more a matter of accompaniment, which is not involving the same tasks and responsibilities. To gather a certain number of artworks which don’t necessarily resonate with each other at first, but end up somehow “talking” together, reciprocating meanings and mirroring perspectives, is for me a creative “gesture”, indeed.

About my experience more specifically, curating comes from writing rather than art practice—my visual art background is far, literally in time and in any relevant way I would say. But there is a privileged perspective by having an artistic background: it certainly gives the advantage to possess a certain knowledge of what an artistic practice can be from the inside. To know the burden of uncertainties and decision- making, the resistance of materiality and the experimental approach to it, the testing of an idea, of a concept, of a context. Also to be familiar with the theory/practice interrelation, and the struggle it may trigger, is obviously a knowledgeable posture for a curator, because it’s often a quite concrete concern for the artists.

What actually happened, in my case, is that I wrote about art for many years before starting to think about curating: exhibitions texts, reviews for magazines, residencies texts, even artwork descriptions for artist’s websites, etc. I also worked for a digital art festival, namely the ELEKTRA Festival in Montreal for ten years. I’ve been increasingly closer to digital art during this period of time and also I was, amongst many other things, writing grant applications for artistic projects. Writing is a powerful tool to read the world, to interpret, analyse, and examine a complex object under all possible angles. And art is a complex object “par excellence”. Writing is also a creative force in itself and from this very force, I’ve been compelled to start curating at some point. Curating means many things—many very pragmatic things I would even say—and one of them is constructing, structuring and articulating meaning around artworks. In this exercise around language and how it can support and convey ideas, imagination plays a crucial role: words can build worlds, literature and poetry are proofs of it, but theoretical and intellectual writing also works on bringing concepts further, widening our views and perspectives, creating channels that communicate beyond visuality.

Then where does art and curating diverge in terms of creation? Curating, for me, situates itself on a lower level. Art can definitely exist without curating; while the other way around isn’t true. Curating should be there, first and foremost, to support artistic visions by bringing them together, creating context, providing care in doing so, and communicating outward about the artworks and the whole exhibition project. I see the curator as an orchestrator—hence a creative part—but also as an interface between the works and the world.

The Future of Creative Industries and Curating in the Age of AI

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence has already transformed the ‘rules of the game’ in the art world in various respects, giving rise to conflicting views. Some argue that AI will make human creativity more valuable, while others predict that it will eventually replace humans in art and design professions. Which of these scenarios do you expect to become more prevalent in the future? How do you think AI will reshape the digital art sphere and its professional landscape? In particular, how might it affect the function and scope of curatorial practice?

To me, neither of these scenarios are going to happen in an absolute way. I’m no futurologist—and my posture toward AI will probably seem banal and boring here—but within the framework of artistic practice, I see it as a technological tool amongst others. The disruption it’s already generating along the way, and obviously in the future, might be comparable to the one of photography, video and the Internet: it’s a new paradigmatic shift within the whole telecommunication system. A quite big shift actually, as will be a larger access to quantum computation eventually. And as for any new technological tool used by artists, distance and time will reveal what’s currently happening. When an artistic event like Send/Receive took place in 1977, where artists were connecting in real time between New York and San Francisco through satellite technology, it was the networked art practice shaping itself from scratch. It was emerging while not knowing what it actually was going to become, how it was going to transform art practices, and in which terms it would integrate art history.

It might affect the curatorial practice the same way: curators follow artistic practice’s developments and their expression’s vehicles—whether they’re technological or not. So it’s a lot about understanding new ways of conveying discourses, how new materialities and functionalities can express ideas and concepts.

With regard to the integration of AI into digital artistic practices, certain art centers are carrying out highly relevant initiatives in the areas of artistic and technological support. In this regard, my colleagues at Sporobole are doing remarkable work around artist residencies and critical approaches to AI: we need to create contexts like these to spark reflection and debate.