Langlois, Justin

The instrumentalization of biometric data orchestrated through surveillance technologies can press today’s users of communication tools, devices, and platforms to opt out of such systems. This graduate research thesis aims to reveal the imperceptible forces that underwrite recognition technologies, through a series of experiments and the creation of multimedia installations that address the unethical relationship between active users and structures of control. Initiated at Emily Carr University, Vancouver, from September 2020 to May 2022, this research project hopes to uncover new possibilities for machine learning systems to propose protective devices based on image datasets composed of theatrical masks. This project explores the potential to apply generative models simultaneously as a response to facial recognition technology and as a mode of resistance to the dominance of these models. Finally, this research contributes to raising awareness toward extractive systems and surveillance technologies, while questioning the impact of artificial intelligence and its potential future outcomes.

The impulse at the center of my practice is simple: I am longing for time that stretches out. I do not wish to spend time, buy time, save time, kill time, keep time. I want to inhabit time. This paper is divided into four sections. In Entanglement, I reflect on the capitalist time structures I grew up within, and how they inform my positionality and practice. I chart my encounters with Zenji Dogen and Carlo Rovelli’s writing, whose ideas challenged my assumptions about time, and compelled me to search for time’s expansive layers. In Unravelling, I write about my material practice. It is through embodied observation of changing material processes that I first glimpse time that cannot be contained by the capitalist boundaries of hours and minutes. Here, I examine the elements and methods of a key durational performance – Maintenance in Progress. In Threads, I explore three layers of time – earth time, saeculum time and ritual time – that I have discovered within my practice. In this section, I discuss the film, Laying Ground, which will be screened at my thesis exhibition. Finally, in Weaving, I write about not knowing through a current project, Watering Cracks, and reflect on my expanded relationship with time. I do not dive into detailed examinations of capitalist time in this paper, though I recognize my entanglement with it. I want to experience the qualities of time that arise from the earth’s cycles, from embodied rituals and from the life-spans of my durational works themselves. I do not want to define my work in opposition to commodified, linear time. As I have discovered through my practice, different times exist not in tidy binaries, but as complex layers within which we are enfolded.