Summer residency at the Villa

During summer 2018, the media arts duo Lagueux & L’Écuyer, along with digital artist Roby Provost Blanchard are in residence inside the Villa — véhicule d’arts actuels et numériques, which, for this event, will be parked at the Centre de la nature de Laval. As a site for creativity, presentation, and cultural mediation, the Villa vehicle gives artists the opportunity to engage the public in the creative process.

Residency 1

Period: July 13-21 and August 24-29

The art duo of Stéphanie Lagueux and Jonathan L’Écuyer experiment with various public interactions through two works in progress. In the spirit of this process, they seek encounters with fellow artists, as well as the general public, as a way to forge new exploratory paths.

Lagueux & L’Écuyer’s project, titled Conversations: un laboratoire socioludique, invites people to lie on a bed and play a collaborative video game that tests their ability to work collaboratively. Their reactions and conversations are documented for future analysis by the  artists. The installation is presented within an inflatable dome that acts as both shelter and lure, with peep holes all around to give curious onlookers a view inside. With the collaboration of Mélanie Binette and the Milieu de nulle part collective, they explore new ways of approaching passers-by.

Read more about Conversations

In the project titled La pêche à la mouche à feu (fire fly fishing), the public is invited to create small electronic, luminous craft projects by exploring the poetic potential of garden lamps and recycled materials, with the goal of creating a path to the Villa.

Read more about La pêche à la mouche à feu

And in association with Verticale’s Club de lecture, Lagueux and L’Écuyer present a Video Club in collaboration with the Lanaudière-based organization Art Partage, who will organize an outdoor screening of selected video works.

Residency 2

August 4-17

When we’re in a car, we look outside, quickly and easily see the front of buildings, and gaze longer at passing landscapes. When we spot someone through a window, we might briefly imagine what their daily routine is like. We curiously watch mechanics at work through an open garage door.

On bord the Verticale Villa, we stop for a moment to digitize images of buildings we once knew 10 years ago, stopping by between our film studies class at Montmorency and a round of arcade games at Amusement 2000. We park near a baseball diamond and ask the Pee-Wee players to describe their ideal ball park to us.

We are on a nomadic residency. We drive to capture, we stop to reconstruct. We work on a few proposals for a trick-filled circuit in Laval.

From our camping chairs, we watch the city change.

Rencontre in-game is an experiment in virtual reality.

“It’s as if we’re dead and walking through a casino” says one of the participants. Inside the virtual reality headset, the player levitates in a 3D environment. These digitized sites, based on photographs shot throughout Laval, Burlington and at Lac Châteauvert, form an impossible landscape and a surreal assemblage.

For the artist, 3D digitization is part of larger practice of documenting reality. The headset allows users to revisit places that have been frozen in time. For some, their role is of a passive train traveller; for others, it’s like a “zombie walk through a casino.”

Sound design by Gabriel Ledoux
Artist’s website