Introduction
Jean-Philippe Côté is an artist, researcher and professor based in the Montréal (Québec, Canada) metropolitan area. His work takes shape at the juncture of art, obsolescence, materiality and technology. His interactive art practice explores a diffractive mirroring of the visitor’s body and gestures using appropriated, and often outdated, technical devices. By generating distorted and liminal self-representations, he underlines the dislocation between who we are and how we present ourselves in a world heavily mediated by manifold technologies.
Jean-Philippe leverages his early years as an award-winning developer to devise algorithmic approaches to creating art and re-shaping reality. This makes him a respected contributor to the open source community, especially in the fields of creative coding and physical computing.
His subject of choice is the human body which he often draws using micro or macro line segments. While figurative, his work challenges perception. The viewer’s brain is asked to fill in the gaps and one often needs to change his point of view to fully appreciate the work.
About the Work
His work has been featured on 4 continents in prestigious venues such as Venice’s Arsenale, Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, Rio’s Museu do Amanhã, Montréal’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Société des arts technologiques (SAT), São Paulo’s Centro Cultural FIESP, Düsseldorf’s Capitol Theather or Fukuoka City’s Science Museum.
He has been invited to present or speak at various prestigious events such as: Ars Electronica (Austria), ISEA (France, South Korea), FILE (Brazil), Arte Laguna Prize (Italy), Die Blaue Nacht (Germany), Eyeo (USA), FITC (Canada), CODAME Art+Tech (USA), 404 Festival (USA, Mexico & Japan), etc.
His work has been supported by several grants from a variety of artistic and academic sponsoring organizations. More details can be found in his curriculum vitae.
Awards
In 2019, his interactive work Yöti – The Algorithmic Portrait Artist won the Sculpture, installation and virtual art category at the Arte Laguna Prize in Venice. This is what the judges had to say:
For the technical research that integrates the millenary tradition of the portrait with a deeply contemporary vision in relation to the new technologies that are taking hold in the world of contemporary art.
This artwork was also a finalist of the International Symposium on Electronic Art‘s juried exhibition in Gwangju, South Korea:
Among the exhibitions, a few works were noticeable: (…) «Yöti, The Algorithmic Portrait Artist », by Jean-Philippe Côté, a machine combined of different elements, taking a picture of the user and rendering it through jagged white lines drawn with a white pen on a black sheet through a plotter, reducing the universal aesthetic of the selfie to a perfectly balanced combination of lines (…) »
His visual work was published twice in Aesthetica Art Prize‘s Anthology (2019 ands 2021) as well as in Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art Magazine and several exhibition catalogs.
Background
Going back to school to complete a master’s degree (2009-2013) is what brought him to visual and interactive arts. His research work yielded an interactive platform for non-musicians to play music together called Mmm. Afterwards, it did not take long before Jean-Philippe realized he could apply this same approach to visual and interactive arts. Having, himself, no formal training in drawing, he could use his programming skills to devise software and hardware contraptions that would help him create visual art. This has been is approach ever since.
Jean-Philippe teaches in the Multimedia Department of Collège Edouard-Montpetit. He holds a master’s degree in communication (with a specialization in experimental media) and is a doctoral candidate in the Arts Studies & Practices program at Université du Québec à Montréal. His research focuses on the reuse of obsolete devices and media in the contexte of interactive art.
He also is a speaker and workshop host and used to be a drummer and street photographer.