Frédérick Maheux

Frédérick Maheux is a multimedia artist whose practice is rooted in technological subversion and transgression strategies. He has explored emerging subcultures of the digital age through a series of documentary and experimental feature films, including Art/Crime (2011), ANA (2015), and Drug Porn (2018), in addition to creating numerous short films, installations, and music videos presented internationally.

Since 2020, he has dedicated himself to experimental video game practice as a way to study the philosophical concept of noise. He also performs in various industrial and noise music groups, including Un Regard Froid, creates analog collages, and is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Communication at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Here is an artist talk with Frédérick Maheux, followed by a panel discussion with Alex Lee and JB Ghuman Jr., where he shares his insights on the metaverse and his perspectives on virtuality.

"But it’s funny because, as you said, the Metaverse became a buzzword when Facebook rebranded as Meta. Then Meta took over, and later, they laid off many employees who had been working on Metaverse and virtual reality teams to shift their focus to AI. (...) And already, back in 2002, Massumi wrote about the superiority of the analog, arguing that even the term 'virtual reality' is misleading. He pointed out that VR is digital, but there’s no real 'virtuality' in that—it originally referred to potential, potentialities in virtual reality. It’s just code."

"So there aren’t really a lot of possibilities, except when the analog—the human—interacts with these tools. That’s when the digital becomes something with potentialities. And we see this in many ways. For instance, the furries community creates their own Metaverse-like spaces to explore new forms of sexuality. These spaces are now even becoming academic subjects of discussion. (...) And I feel like the same applies to AI. The Metaverse, as a commercial entity, was an attempt to be the next iPhone, the next mobile revolution; it was meant to be a synergy of various technologies coming together to create a paradigm shift."

— Frédérick Maheux

Check out more details about Cyborg TAROT, a noisy tarot machine that explores posthuman contingencies, created by Frédérick Maheux: https://deathorgone.itch.io/cyborg-tarot