Guillaume Côté

Autonomous Residency | January – March 2025

Guillaume Côté is a Quebec City-based multidisciplinary artist working in digital art since 2015. Recipient of over thirty project grants from major arts councils, he evolves within several artistic ecosystems; with Trames collective, he has developed a unique practice blending sound art and documentary, while with Falaises and Aubes collectives, he develops a maximalist abstract sensory approach. In 2022, he began a cycle of digital works based on his hypersensitivity to light, which will continue until 2026.​

Adopting a methodology based on knowledge sharing, he is a well-presented instructor, having given more than a dozen workshops to the artistic community. At the same time, Côté puts a great deal of effort into democratizing sound art among young people; he has developed an online educational platform, Écho, aimed at a young audience, in addition to investing in co-creation projects with the community.

Versatile and a jack-of-all-trades, he has been commissioned by several centers (Phos, Sporobole, Avatar, RIDM) to produce works ranging from in-situ digital creations to installations and sound art. His work has been presented at renowned events such as Mutek (Montreal, Canada and Tokyo, Japan), Elektra (Montreal, Canada), Stereolux (Nantes, France), Intonal (Malmo, Sweden), LEV (Gijon, Spain), Gnration (Braga, Portugal), PRECTXE (Seoul, South Korea). 

Photo credits (portrait): Sarah Senné

 

Discrete Pulse of Light

The second work in a triptych on luminous phenomena (Discrete Stream of Light, 2022, Discrete Flow of Light, 2025-26), Discrete Pulse of Light (2024-25) underscores the desire to move towards the tangible, the natural manifestations we can perceive (light diffraction, interference). This tangibility raises questions about the unpredictability, inaccuracy and fragility of our threshold of perception, and thus our relationship with the world.

This perceptive sensitivity to light is also rooted in the artist’s own physical sensitivity, linked to his physical condition: as a young man, he could not look at the sun without fainting. The project thus bears witness to a unique and striking sensory relationship. The device, and consequently the entire performance, allows us to share a perception, a vision of the raw luminous material, as experienced by the artist in his youth. Pulse is therefore Côté’s most personal project to date and marks a turning point in his practice: an artistic proposition linked to an intimate life experience. 

The project consists of a rail-mounted lighting system, incorporating a pair of light and 3D-printed reflective surfaces. The luminosity and superimposition of the visual layers will be entirely controlled by software, via a custom-designed device based largely on the automated rail system used in cinema, creating a process in constant motion, in synergy with the soundtrack. Sound, a cataclysm and vector of change, will modulate the behavior of the motorized system, creating a synchronicity of mediums, to which the artist will make modifications throughout the performance. It is with this system that the artist will create the performance during his residency at DAÏMÔN.

The team at Centre de production DAÏMÔN is happy to welcome Guillaume Côté between January 6th and March 31rst 2025, through our Autonomous Residency program.

Photo (banners) courtesy of the artist.