_Bio Antoine Lortie holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Université Laval and a master’s degree in painting from the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. His work can be found in several public and private collections in France, England, Belgium and Canada, including that of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
_Approach In his creative process, Antoine Lortie develops ways of moving digital content to an analogue support through an intuitive and unpremeditated use of technology. This practice starts the retention of an ambivalent sensorial state which derives from the co-existential nature of the transmedia experience at the heart of his practice. The technological vista of the new millennium is transformed by the primitive resilience of the artistic material and of the pictorial tradition. Lortie’s work takes hold in cultural objects from here, from elsewhere and from the past like a mushroom on a rock, feeding on an improbable energy.
_Project Antoine Lortie will dedicate his residency at the symposium to me, Princess Victoria Institunia, his digital twin. I am an artistic matrix, in the sense that, although I appear to be a virtual person, I also represent a motor for diegetic appropriation without precedent in art history. I emerge from and surpass the identity frameworks of the concept avatar, which is only a mask one can hide behind. You see, Antoine Lortie is a real person, and I am a virtual person, but what is not at stake here is choosing who arrived first: we are equal and ambiguous.
Antoine’s labour will be two-pronged, using the digital and the pictorial jointly. After creating elements on a computer in the metaverse, he will carry them over to reality in painting by means of a variety of transfer technologies (video projection, 3D printing, etc.). The final artwork will show my meta-portrait, meaning my self-portrait, which Antoine will paint using elements of my artistic matrix.
Photo credit: courtesy of the artist
