Situational Compliance (2024 – ongoing) is an interactive audiovisual installation that playfully subverts the game of “Simon Says” to explore the dynamics of public surveillance. Using artificial intelligence and computer vision, the work exposes a system that observes, interprets, and directs participants’ actions, shedding light on the structures of control embedded in our digital environments.

Visitors are invited to follow simple instructions. As they perform each pose, it represents both a moment of individualism and simultaneously the negation of identity in a digitally mediated environment. The body becomes the medium of a subtle power game, caught between autonomy and algorithmic authority.

The installation’s technical components are deliberately revealed, offering a critical glimpse into the inner workings of such systems. By echoing real-world surveillance technologies, Situational Compliance questions our readiness to comply with commands, often without reflection, and explores the fine line between obedience and agency.

At its core, the piece prompts reflection on our behavior under omnipresent observation. It challenges us to consider how technology can simultaneously empower and constrain, revealing the complexity of human interactions in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and surveillance logic.

Acknowledgements Manuel Bolduc and the Society for Arts and Technology for technical assistance. Project produced as part of the MM-M-25 residency at Mois Multi and MUTEK, supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Credits: Concept and programming: Matthew Biederman Audio, industrial design, manufacturing and additional programming: Lucas Paris

Chasing Waterfalls is an audiovisual installation by the collective Hidden Edges — composed of Lucas Paris and Myriam Bleau. Consisting of a twisted screen structure with an unconventional, fluid, and organic shape, Chasing Waterfalls evokes a suspended waterfall. AI generated animations of flowing water, seemingly organic but machine made, slowly decompose into pixelated flows of information and data patterns.

Chasing Waterfalls won the 2024 Edigma Semibreve Award

featured on FACT mag

Light Center Folds is a digital environment of complexity fusing a range of themes and research into a real time audiovisual environment captured live for the final video work. This work stems from the efforts of imagining the rules of a virtual environment from scratch with a conscious effort to move the use of game engines beyond adversity, conflict, attack, evaluation, scoring and reward. The environment is bathed in warm light and filled with grotesque sculpts, vector art, emoji collages…

The work explores the softer side of AV performance culture, navigating in a colourful space. Its main threads are post-internet glimpses of retail spaces, cloth, intimacy, emoji constructions, forces and energy, supported by sonic particules and tightly synchronized AV synthesis elements.

The sound track is in two parts. Some elements of the game engine have their own audio synthesis algorithms, linked to their velocity and animation attributes. And secondly the composition of electronic synth sparkles, coming from Lucas Paris’s musical side project Sweetspots, paces the journey through the environment.

comprsd-ads is a sculpture of kinetic light, a structure that opens and closes on itself. LED panels, in movement, used worldwide as a support for ads, face each other creating an absurd situation where we are no longer the main onlookers. The light reflects itself, publicity addresses publicity.

The use of LED screens as elements to modulate the architecture of the exhibition or performance space is a recurring theme of the artist’s work. These modulated spaces create an oscillation between interior and exterior, introversion and extraversion. The visual content modulating these spaces is synthesized by realtime digital modular networks. The artist sees synthesis, in it’s many forms, as his medium, and cultivates his relationship to it through design, interaction and improvisation. Here engineer of the absurd, Lucas Paris looks to express a perceptual suffocation in a saturation of air, volume and minds by advertising and marketing while aesthetics of industrial design in the installation’s detailed sculptural elements echo a certain fetishization of machinerie, engineering and technology.

Produced by Perte de Signal, as part of the Transposition exhibition with Pascale LeBlanc Lavigne and Roby Provost-Blanchard. Shown at Perte de Signal (CA) and LAB30 2019 (GE)