MATHIEU ST-PIERRE

Mathieu St-Pierre (who curiously goes by the email moniker of “unknownkino@gmail.com”) creates digital art. Corrupted digital art, to be precise.

This makes perfect sense when you learn that Mathieu took up film production and probably spent a hefty chunk of time staring at such images, enough to consider them “visual artifacts” that “not only document the fragility of virtual data, but often trigger memories of real world life experience”.

Here’s what else the Canadian-bred, Korean-based artist has to say (according to slideshow order):

Scream. With Scream and Prescription, I still worked with video files, but the main layer was a picture from an old Filipino martial arts film. Working with glitches and digital media always inspires me with the idea of speed, as those corrupted images are the fruit of a single moment in time. Just like a frame in a film, this picture tries to combine that frozen fraction of a second while showing the encoding error of the process, because that moment is too fast to capture.

Prescription. I wanted to recreate the feeling of a painting, but without taking away the main digital element. So depending on where you look on the image, you are constantly thrown back and forth between the textures of oil painting and the rawness of digital media. I used an old Chinese black and white movie still.

3 Nights in Bangkok (3 from the Series). I didn’t shy away from showing my main material source: pornographic video files. However, I always try not to be too explicit with my work, as shocking is not my goal. I rather try to create vibrant imagery that will keep the viewer looking for details and meaning. In the frames I selected, I wanted to show an enigmatic and ambiguous approach to the female body and its situation. Displaying the body in some erotic poses but without any interaction was a way to promote that idea.

Dorm 1. As I usually work with overlapped video files, one of them is always heavily glitched or corrupted. To get that result, I most of the time use pornography AVI files since they are very easy to modify and glitch. The Dorm series, along with 3 Nights in Bangkok, are perhaps the only works I’ve done that truly show the nature of the video that I used in the process.

Ocean 1 and Ocean 2. I wanted to amplify the sense of speed that I usually try to get with my other pieces, only this time I also tried to work on a more peaceful imagery. I’m quite happy with the result since there is a strong duality between calmness and vibration in both images.  Getting that result was quite challenging and took me many tries.

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