BIO
Juliette Lusven is a French interdisciplinary artist-researcher in visual and media arts who lives and works in Montreal. Her exploratory and processual approach is inspired by the geosciences and the processes of perceptive and technological visualization in relation to terrestrial and oceanic space. At the crossroads of different forms of installations, montages and projections, she questions our relationship to the world in relation to technology, materiality, flows (natural and artificial) and relationships of scale, often in a problematic of perception. She is interested in the interconnections that occur between natural and technological phenomena in order to explore their visual and experiential resonance as well as their informational, environmental and imaginary aspects. She is currently pursuing a PhD in art studies and practices at UQÀM where she is developing the research-creation project Exploration.135, which a new installation version is presented at the ELEKTRA gallery. Since 2020, she has been undertaking an experimental residency at the GEOTOP laboratory in earth and atmospheric sciences and underwater micropaleontology. Her work is supported by HEXAGRAM, the network of research-creation in arts, cultures and technologies and was recently presented at the Agora Hydro-Québec, at the Night of Ideas in Montreal (2020) and at the MUTEK online festival (2021).
Detail of the installation, still of the morphing of the terrestrial connectivity points for the last transatlantic telecommunication cable operational from winter 2022, linking the United States, Spain and England, at a speed of 340 tbps and bearing the name of Grace Hopper in homage to the American mathematician at the origin of one of the first computer programming language.
Inspired by bathymetric archives related to the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, Juliette Lusven explores our relationship to the world and to technological interconnectivity through the current undersea Internet infrastructure.
Evoked as the backbone of our connectivity, since almost all of our digital exchanges transit through this vast network of fiber optic cables installed at the bottom of the ocean, this infrastructure seems just as imperceptible, also referring to an often inaccessible undersea environment that is still being mapped. Produced in the context of the doctoral research-creation project Exploration.135, this exhibition questions this phenomenon of invisibility and circulation from the Atlantic Ocean and the Web, by articulating different materialities and scale relationships in the implementation of an installation corpus.The cable routes become a geoperceptive and computational exploration of our hyperconnectivity, interacting flows, data visualization, undersea topography and satellite imagery with microscopic captures of technological residues, sediments and microfossils from the ocean floor.
In collaboration with Max Boutin and Marc-André Cossette.
Photo credit: Alejandro Escamilla