Philippe Caron

Philippe (he/him) an idealist. He loves typography, colour, and things that are well done. For Philippe, design is an art to be practiced slowly, with good friends, patience and attention to detail. By day, Philippe designs websites and aspires to understand how humans navigate life and technology. At night, Philippe sometimes sits in front of his computer to write a few more lines of code, generating generative sketches of infinite variations.

Philippe holds a bachelor’s degree in Design and Computation Arts from Concordia University, and a master’s in museum studies from Université du Québec en Outaouais, where he sought to understand and explain the limits of museum programs towards internet arts. Always conflicted between the material reality of graphic arts and the abstract ideal of digital art, Philippe seeks to reconcile these two worlds by creating graphic objects from his generative sketches which are born digital.

His generative sketches are inspired by nature, abstract art, geometry, and mathematics. His career in web design also influences his artistic practice, by making his works accessible and interactive for all through his site cliqu.art. A tinkerer, Philippe built his own pen plotter as a portal between the digital and physical worlds.

‘Generative art is full of potential by definition: it generates a work and allows infinite variations. This potential is easily erased when the work is regenerated, unless you have the key in hand to recreate the same work stroke by stroke. It is easily replaced by another variation.

In their native state, my generative sketches are ephemeral. They exist in the computer’s memory. To keep a version of them, I can take a screenshot and save it as an image. Sticking to this routine is practical for sharing sketches on social media, but otherwise quite sad as a finality. There must be other techniques of materialization that can act as a portal between the generated work and the physical world.

In my project. I am looking for these techniques – or techniques – of materialization that will translate the wonder of the generative work from the screen to the physical support. The pen plotter is the manufacturing tool that animates my current approach. However, there are limits to this tool, which I find limiting. One of my questions motivating my project is therefore to explore what the machine can do, and the additional gestures that I will have to perform manually.‘

-Philippe Caron, 2025

The team at the Centre de production DAÏMÔN is happy to host Philippe Caron between May 6th and 18th, 2025, through our First Work Program.