Isabelle Gagné, Paul Gascou-Vaillancourt, Stéphane Archambault: PRÖSPECT

Title:

PRÖSPECT

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Exhibiting Artist(s):

Symposium:

ISEA2020: 26th International Symposium on Electronic Art

Creation Year:

2019

Medium:

Internet-based artwork that reinterprets images from photographic archives extracted from royalty-free databases

Artist Statement:

Using the metaphor of geology, PRÖSPECT is a generative work of art that reinterprets images from photographic archives extracted from royalty-free databases every four hours. The inexhaustible heritage of archives available on the web becomes the field of exploration of this work, which displays characteristics of the “aesthetics of flow.” The bot generates photographic collages from matches found by the Google search engine.

The work of collage and remixing between historical and contemporary images renders the reading of the photographic document opaque, thus echoing certain experiments of the artistic avant-gardes at the beginning of the 20th century. The images are associated with original texts of two verses written by Stéphane Archambault. The associations between texts and images are randomly made within large semantic fields, thus opening up new interpretations.

The work can be consulted in two modes: cycle (panorama) and deposit (close reading).