Centre des arts actuels Skol

Jean Maxime Dufresne / L’agence / Agency

by Fabien Loszach

Jean Maxime Dufresne’s Agency is made up of informational nodes, or viewing stations, through which ideas freely circulate. Running simultaneously on these stations are a series of interviews recorded as peripatetic strolls through the city. For the most part, the interviewees—artists, sociologists, architects, art teachers, translators, researchers, cultural organizers, etc.—are active members of Montreal’s cultural community. During the interviews, the subjects discussed are marked by an ad hoc signage of keywords which are then introduced into the matrix of the Agency.

Agence / Agency

Agency, then, functions as a database, a structured, organized set of information, structured, that is, in a relational and thematic manner: it collects, sorts, and establishes connections between elements of its content and guides the visitor and user. It offers a wide range of information, on urban life, architecture, housing, social diversity and endogamy, the usage and uncertainty of spaces, cunning behaviour, interstitial practices, the territorial division into segregated areas, post-conflict architectural planning, technology, vertical neighbourhoods, physical mobility, utopian visions, heterotopian spaces… Though it may seem hard to make sense of the onslaught of subjects and lines of thought, one may safely assume that Dufresne’s work rests on a fundamental sociological question: “what arrangements can best help human beings live together and strengthen social connections?”

The title chosen for the exhibition offers a dual interpretation. In French (as in English), an agency is an office, or department, where people deal mainly with administrative information. By its very nature, the agency is an “exemplary” locus in our society, distilling within itself the ideal of what German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) had termed a “rational-legal society.” As opposed to this purely objective definition, Dufresne’s installation seeks rather to use the various elements—the viewing stations, a shared kitchen, a transcription office, a listening area, etc.—to create a “hub,” a space that provides the opportunity for encounters between people and ideas. There is a suggestion here of thought in motion, striving to reproduce and proliferate in the gallery space, as evinced in the publication onto hard-copy and the reading by a generated voice of excerpts from the interviews.

Agency, in English, also refers to a philosophy of action, one that would in some sense construe the participants as “agents” having a capacity for affecting various issues and engaging in critical reflection. This sense of the term has no direct translation in French, where the concept may be rendered by such phrases as “capacity for action,” “decision making,” autonomisation (“empowerment”), or agentivité. Today, the term “agent,” derived from the Latin agere —to act, to do—, commonly designates a person responsible for the affairs and interests of another (person, group, country, etc.). The participants expressing themselves here play a similar role; they endorse interests and points of view in the public sphere; as such, they are “political” agents. The political, need we recall, is the sphere of action par excellence, where actors manifest their differences, participating in citizens’ debates to arrive at the best possible decisions for the life of the city.

Hypertextual Intelligence

Beyond the subjects broached in Agency, the project’s architecture can be thought-provoking. Indeed, one may see in this exhibition an exemplary presentation of how new technologies re-articulate the coupling of message (information) and medium (support) in the digital era and how this reorganization simultaneously entails a disruption of our cognitive structures. The agency is a collection comprising a given quantity of thematically categorized and ordered information. This taxonomy reminds one of the ordering of ideas and concepts on the Internet with the use of key-words, bookmarks, or headings. On the Web, as in Agency, thematic differentiation is always offset by the introduction of a correspondence between the words: the latter are all hypertextual links; they take us to something else. The Internet brings to light the structure of the word: at once a differentiation, the reduction to a definition, and an opening onto another locus of meaning, a correspondance. The word is not an abstract body, it is always a border crossing, a throughway of the commonplace, a transmission, an interstitial space.

More broadly still, one may conceive Agency as an allegory for the process of thought in our era of new technologies. As Neil Postman recalls, “the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations.”¹ Thus, when we change the support or the media, everything else seems to change—ways of thinking, science, culture. One may suppose that new digital media have led us to reflect differently. In the immense, unfettered, malleable, and free hypertext the Internet has become, analytic intelligence, the coherent, logical, ordered arrangement of ideas in classical humanist tradition, is giving way to an intelligence that takes the form of a network, a hypertextual and referential intelligence. In their prophetic book, Netocracy,² Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist suggest that proficiency in sorting information has become nearly as important as knowing how to create it. An increasing number of people and programs have specialized in the art of helping us find the right information, that is, the information that corresponds exactly to our needs. Such people and tools are specialized in the art of searching for and finding the right info in the haystack of the media world, that is, they can distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant. Agency is certainly one of these tools.

¹ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin, 1986).

² 2. Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist, Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism (FT Press, 2002).