Serge Oliver Rondeau & Charles-Antoine Blais Métivier are social archaeologists. Their ongoing project, After Faceb00k, chronicles, documents, and organizes Facebook activity worldwide. Taking on the roles of archivists, Rondeau & Blais Métivier categorize photos according to content and theme to discover trends among demographics and regions. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third highest in population, surpassed only by India and China; the social network has become a non-negligible part of our lives. Tailored for the Kelowna presentation, this large-scale photography installation collates social media images provided by the citizens of Kelowna, each image remaining in its original visual context including comments and activity.
Bridging disciplines and engaged in contemporary social contexts, Rondeau & Blais Métivier experimental approach melds ethnography, archaeology and art to form a region-specific ‘social media persona’ grounded in a methodological, scientific process. After Faceb00k revisions the traditional artist meme of archiving a demographic. In the spirit of August Sander, they examine the banal and simple everyday moments to compile a snapshot of culture and community as presented through modern technology. Despite being grounded in traditional artistic practice, After Faceb00k is not without its risks. In reappropriating images released by their creators into the public realm, Rondeau & Blais Métivier conduct a social experiment of unspoken voyeurism, leading us to question the willingness of the public to publish private information and the historical mark that will be left by social media in the coming years.
Charles-Antoine Blais Métivier is a multidisciplinary artist from the city of Sherbrooke, living and working mainly between Montreal and the internet. Like many, he was born in the 1980s. He holds a Masters in Visual and Media Arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal. Charles-Antoine's works have been presented in a range of solo and group exhibitions across Quebec, but also in Italy, France, Russia, across Canada, as well as in a more or less popular reality show on the Canal Evasion.
Fortunately for him, his works are also part of private and institutional collections.
For more information about Blais Métivier, visit his website.
Serge-Oliver Rondeau has a background in filmmaking and in sociology and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Ottawa's School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies. His practice-based research brings together media arts and experimental ethnography to follow human and other-than-human entities (animals, landscapes, machines, plants, and so on) in different types of assemblages. He has participated, among other things, in the Manif d'art 7 in Québec City (2014) with the group Épopée and in the Mois de la Photo à Montréal (2016) around the theme "the post-photographic condition" curated by Joan Fontcuberta. As part of this biennale, Rondeau presented at the McCord Museum a nine-channel video installation, “In loving memory <3”, with the collective After Faceb00k of which he is a cofounder.
For more information on Rondeau, visit his website.