Line Nault is interested more in the perceptual than the spectacular. Through the speaking or moving body, she reveals the invisible structures of human mechanisms and machine behaviour. She describes her approach as “interstitial,” both in her work on the body and in her view of her artistic practice.

In line with her creative approach, Line gives research workshops based on the technological devices used in her projects. She also teaches Gyrotonics and Gyrokinesis. Since 2014, she has organized the Vendredi Bouilli event at the Artificiel studio. After obtaining a B.F.A. in dance, she received a graduate degree in Somatic Education from UQAM.

Presented below are examples of Line Nault’s works that reflect her investigations of the body and digital technology.

LA PROBLÉMATIQUE DE L’ERREUR – 2009 (performance)

Three multidisciplinary artists (an actor-composer, a photographer-graphic artist, and a choreographer-dancer) share the stage in a process of evolving interactions. Using software created for the occasion, they explore various temporal and spatial transformations through audiovisual devices (microphones, cameras, projectors) which they manipulate on stage. In predetermined situations, they question the notions of error, of the absolute, and of perception within their respective practices, while placing the body at the forefront of the discourse.

Attachée – 2012 (performative installation)

Attachée is a project of the heart, head and pelvis.

A woman, accompanied by a musician, illustrates the phenomenon of loving. A phenomenon expressed through a device wherein the somatic, the media and the digital are formally attached. The woman wears a corset that measures her breathing movements, her amorous sighs. This biometric data is represented by a virtual and abstract entity, a third character that connects and transforms the text, music and video live on stage.

In developing this project, Line Nault revisited the thirty-year-old content of her diaries, letters, and scribbles about love. She erased the names, places and anecdotes, keeping only a few samples of sensations and reflections. The voids thus created made way for gestures, images and sounds. The rest is neither spoken nor written: it arises from the twists and turns of the meeting between the spectator and this woman in love.

LÀ – 2016 (Interactive installation for 4 people)

Midway between performance and installation, Là is a participatory experience that places the spectators at the heart of the action. Four at a time, the “spectractors,” as the artist likes to call them, wander through a ghostly space, whose contours are made visible by a luminous structure. With the help of a tracking device, the active and sensitive presences of the participants reveal the sound fragments of a story whose course evolves according to their interactions. The layers of the story are intertwined and superimposed, giving rise to a multitude of possible scenarios.

SuperSuper – 2016 (performance)

Based on the search for the ultimate number, and on the principles of bodily resonance in space and digital projection, SuperSuper is a triptych composed of Super 8, Super Reality and Super N64. Body, sound and image are all moulded and connected by a localization system. The movements and displacements of the performers gradually construct a parallel world, an augmented space, a sort of database. The protagonists are subject to a kind of surveillance, which makes them captives to the game in which they participate, leading ultimately to a re-reading of Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”). A project that synthesizes all of Line Nault’s artistic preoccupations, SuperSuper is built around systems, codings, generative flows, movements and words—the movement that speaks and the words that move—that catapult physical, aural and visual elements into zones in which perception is completely transfigured.