For over a decade you’ve been moving through an infinite universe of research, transhumanist, posthumanist, and techno-utopian theory. How do you manage to assimilate all that information and integrate it into your work?
I realized I’ve been wading through these infinitely branching worlds for ten years… That’s a long incubation process. The greatest challenge is probably going back to a blank slate every time, to start with a new conversation, and with fresh eyes. By delving into the questions raised by these movements, it’s as if I’ve put on glasses that I can’t take off, and they colour everything I look at.
As artists, we’re constantly asking ourselves how to deal with the effects, both positive and negative, of coupling the human body and technology—questions that can sometimes be perceived as complex, elitist, or remote, but they are of immediate concern to all of us.
So far, autofiction has been a concrete way to anchor all of this material, to create an experiential dimension that transcends theory, and which the audience can rely on. We make sure that the stories we put on stage compel the audience to measure their own desires and limitations, and then to trace their own paths.
Given your knowledge and discoveries, does the future scare you?
The present probably scares me more than the future. I actually think I’ll have more faith in the present and in the future the day digital literacy becomes a priority in our society. In the meantime, I find it hard to understand how I came to support technology monopolies whose business model is based on the manipulation and monetization of my behaviour.
My digital illiteracy means that for the past twenty years I’ve been dependent on platforms that circumvent our laws, pay no taxes, respect no copyright, erode our democracy, discriminate against us, and pit us against each other. In the last Québec election, not a single politician mentioned the digital future in their campaigns. We’re never invited to dream about it. We’re told we have no choice in the matter.
If the ethical issues around the impact of new technologies aren’t addressed anywhere now, even though they transform every aspects of our lives, how will we be able to work together when it comes to digital immortality, brain implants, or genetic engineering?
The technological monopolies we currently depend on are investing massively in projects that are trying to rethink the future of health. Their vision of coupling the human body and technology is shaking up our notion of human beings, and our relationship to aging and death. I suppose highlighting these issues that aren’t being addressed, or barely, is a way for me, in the present, to resist the trap of dystopia.
You question your duty to pass on this other world we have known. How are transmission and memory made manifest in i/O?
I was born in 1980, and I sometimes joke that I’m fifty percent analogue and fifty percent digital. Half of my life exists through physical objects or in my head, or at least the memories from that half do. I feel like I have some control over those. But I have almost no control over the traces left in the second half of my life.
That archive, that version of myself, evolves and grows without me. I find it strange that I have only very limited access to the billions of bits of data that I’ve been generating for twenty years.
Why did you choose to broach these themes through the prism of mourning for your own father?
I think what ties my father’s story and some of these techno-utopian narratives is the desire to control your own body and your life with dignity. Transhumanists are often criticized for aspiring to extend life and postpone death. But isn’t that what traditional medicine does too? When does extending life become abnormal?
I often say that i/O is science friction, with an r. Throughout my father’s lengthy hospitalization, everything I had heard before celebrating the radical extension of life came crashing down into reality. That was the tension I wanted to explore.
