The work of French multimedia artist Mathieu Briand confounds our preconceptions of visual language by drawing on sources outside traditional art practices. He embraces a domain that encompasses electronic media and music, the sciences, new technology, architecture, phenomenology and virtual space, as well as the protocols of games and rituals. Consequently his work is often produced in collaboration with other artists, scientists, engineers and philosophers, making him an especially appropriate candidate for Dis Voir’s new Encounters series, which allows contemporary artists to collaborate with colleagues they would otherwise not come across, on a specific artist’s book project they would otherwise not have initiated. Ubïq: A Mental Odyssey (the title amalgamates Philip K. Dick’s Ubikand Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) is presented as a « science fiction photo-roman book tour, » with Mathieu Briand as our tour guide. For the journey he has enlisted the writer, Daniel Foucard, who shares Briand’s own unusual synthesis of seemingly disparate genres with characters more or less junkies, more or less monomaniacs, more or less lost type and who has mixed Briand’s narrative with his own work.

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