calling upon the digital touch

2020
Marie-Eve Levasseur
Augmented reality application, printed fabric, ceramic

The work unfolds in a room, on printed fabric and other elements, calling upon ghostly digital appearances that are touching the physical space, nonchalantly caressing its surfaces. They offer a moment of tenderness in the midst of the information flood that our screens make us experience daily. These emerging ghosts are triggered by images that try to tacitly translate feelings into visual inputs, thanks to what a search engine understands from the concept of touch and sensitivity. This AR intervention was made in the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, when our relationship to our private spaces and screens were increasingly intimate and our connection with other bodies turned through videoconferencing and social distancing.



Bio

Marie-Eve Levasseur (*1985, Canada) currently lives and works in Montreal. Her work deals with intimacy, non-human ecosystems, body extensions, and the perception of language and images through screens. Her multidisciplinary approach uses various media such as video, installation, sculpture, 3D animation and augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR). She explores the proximity of technological and organic surfaces in a post-human context while drawing inspiration from feminist science fiction. Her projects use speculative fabulation: imagining situations with fictional devices, extensions for humans and non-humans that open up an interspecies dialogue, to reflect on how we adapt to the system we live in as well as our possible futures.