The video installation Speculative Creatures by Andrée-Anne Roussel explores the role of intuition, prediction and speculation in the worlds of finance, spirituality and algorithmic computing. Evolving, the narrative structure of the work is generated by a probability tool based on Markov chains, a stochastic model defining a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state reached during the previous event. Using code, the order of the multiple audio sequences in the installation differs from one time to another, generating constantly renewed associations of ideas.
Andrée-Anne Roussel had the opportunity to film her project in Manhattan as part of the CALQ - Studio du Québec à New York residency, from August 2022 to January 2023. The artist interviewed and filmed people from very diverse backgrounds: financial forecasting, trend predictions, people working in the field of AI, mediums and clairvoyants (from different spiritual practices). The different testimonies, in voice-over, compose a mosaic of viewpoints around the themes addressed.
The project currently comprises 75 audio files, equivalent to approximately 2 hours of content. A contemplative double projection illustrates the multiple forecasting methods discussed during the interviews. On a flat screen, a program performs real-time analysis of the installation's audio content and generates fortune-telling type predictions from the collected data. To improve accessibility, a French subtitling system is displayed on another flat screen, synchronized with the generative order of the Markov chains.
Biography
Andrée-Anne Roussel is both a filmmaker and new media artist. Working primarily with video medium, her projects take the form of immersive installations and sensory films.
Her artistic approach is intrinsically linked to her desire to understand the world around her. She is interested in the invisible forces that shape our universe and influence our experiences. Consequently, her projects address philosophical and spiritual questions that are at the heart of the human condition and often establish connections between different, even opposing, ways of seeing the world.
Regarding her cinematographic practice, she is particularly interested in sensory cinema: a narrative, hypersensitive, synesthetic cinema that seeks to blur the boundary separating narrative cinema and experimental cinema and that tends to recreate different altered states of consciousness in the viewer.
Her work has notably been presented at the Sapporo International Short Film Festival, the São Paulo International Short Film Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal.