Every year, Fonderie Darling physically invests in Place Publique by installing a site-specific work. This year, guest curator Laurie Cotton Pigeon presents D.o.t.T.D. (Dance of the Techno-Demon[1]) by the Montreal artist duo Anna Eyler and Nicolas Lapointe. The work is a performative installation that includes an augmented-reality experience[3]. Though it looks like an ordinary hot dog stand, the work encourages the public to have nothing short of a first-hand experience with the clairvoyant spirit of vegetarian sausages! Combining humour and philosophical reflection, the artists question our consumer habits and relationship to technologies through an artificial intelligence (AI) that predicts the future.

D.o.t.T.D. extends the issues raised in the performance series Allegorical Circuits for Human Software of the 13th edition of Place Publique, asking us to reconsider, through ingestion and sensory stimulation, the relationship we have to our bodies. Disguised as street vendors throughout the season, the artists ask us to turn the AI of this consumerist fast-food fetish into a divination tool. Unable to resist, the epicurean will receive the steaming, divinatory hot dog from the artists’ hands, which will have the potential to transform into a powerful divination tool. When the hot dog is placed in front of a smartphone or tablet, the sausage’s AI genie is set free. Therefore, it is the device that allows viewers to generate digital information and activate the work. The work’s entire experiential scope results from the interplay between viewers and their participation levels.

From ordinary object to technology that predicts the future, the work recalls that “the medium is the message,” the famous phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan believed that technology also shapes humans despite the fact that we are the ones who create it. From popular imagery to mystical fantasy, the “hallucinatory” experience of D.o.t.T.D. reminds us to question the role of the digital and the blind trust we put in technological progress. An accessory of transformation or a lure—like a significant gap connecting us to our own humanity—the sausage’s spirit asks us whether we concede our individual and collective consciousness to technologies through how we use them. Or whether our consumption of technology blinds us.

Wishing to extend the experience of the site-specific work, the artists will also present a web version of D.o.t.T.D, which the public can consult from the comfort of their homes. The sausage’s divinatory spirit will be rendered in the guise of a generative work. To know their destiny, Internet users will need to upload a JPEG image of a hot dog to the website.

A zine that includes a summary of the process of research and creation of the in situ artwork D.o.t.T.D. is now on sale for $15.   

You can obtain a copy by contacting the artists Anna Eyler and Nicolas Lapointe at this address : dottd.print@gmail.com.

[1] The work’s title is a direct reference to Bronislaw Szerszynski’s discussion of “techno-demonology” (2006).

[2] Augmented reality differs from virtual reality in that it is not entirely synthetic. This technology works by augmenting the natural perception of an environment by superposing 2D or 3D digital components on the real-world environment.