Jean-François Robin

Jean-François Robin (FR) is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based intermedia artist. He completed his Bachelor's Degree in Art & Technology at Aalborg Universitet (Aalborg, DK), before pursuing his art career in France and later in Canada. He graduated with a MFA in Intermedia Arts in 2021. Awarded a Merit Scholarship from the faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, CA), he also received financial support through a scholarship grant from Desjardins (2018) and another research-creation grant from Digital Art Scholar, Jean-Ambroise Vessac (UQAT) 2021, for him to develop his most ambitious undertaking to date, his project Memories of the Future, and the necessary coding and 3D modeling for it to be presented in a VR environment. By relying on digital collage, 3D printing and photogrammetry techniques, his work centers around the translation between material and digital matter, with a particular attention for what resists the translative act, the untranslatable, but also what is transformed and disfigured as a result of this same act. He primarily works with digital molds created by means of photogrammetry. He then sculpts, transforms, makes collages, so as to see new, unpredictable virtual environments emerge. He is interested in exploring the narratives that come from the creation of those uncanny virtual landscapes and sculptural artifacts. On a more conceptual and ideological level, Jean-François Robin is concerned with the manifold temporalities embedded in translations—from digital to material and conversely from material to digital—and the renewed sense of space it might bring about for both humans and more-than-humans.