Jean-Philippe Cô

Jean-Philippe Cô is an artist-researcher who transforms obsolete technologies into playful, poetic interactive installations. Working with discarded devices, from pen plotters and ATM screens to security cameras, flatbed scanners and iPhones, he combines material experimentation with custom software to imagine new futures for technological debris. His works often mirror and transform visitors’ bodies, exploring the tensions between identity, otherness, surveillance and technologically mediated self-representation.

His installations have been presented internationally at events including Ars Electronica, ISEA, Sónar, FILE and the 404 Festival, and at venues such as Venice’s Arsenale, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Montréal’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Rio de Janeiro’s Museu do Amanhã. His work has received an Arte Laguna Prize, a NUMIX Award and the 2026 Culture Montérégie Digital Award for Panégoptique.

Cô holds a PhD in Arts Studies and Practices from Université du Québec à Montréal. His research examines the reuse of obsolete devices in interactive art through what he describes as a technoresidual practice. He teaches interactive media at Collège Édouard-Montpetit and contributes actively to open-source creative coding communities.

ARTWORK

Panégoptique (Installation)
Panégoptique is an interactive installation that dynamically fuses the faces of two participants to create imaginary hybrid beings at the intersection of familiarity and otherness. By blending texture, colour, and topology, it produces unsettling portraits that spark discussion about how technology, society, as well as our own vanity and fears, mediate our self-image.

The installation itself is a sculptural assembly of 12 obsolete iPhones. The use of devices deemed culturally outdated—though still fully functional—is deliberate. It seeks to question our relationship to the temporality and ecology of technology. By invoking the iPhone’s omnipresence and cultural significance, the installation also interrogates our personal relationship to social status and obsolescence, as well as to biosurveillance and self-representation.

Technically speaking, the cell phones are used to detect the visitors’ faces and photograph them. The images are then sent to the system’s “brain” which transforms them into 3D models and combines them. The resulting portrait is composed of dynamic areas drawn from alternating pixel matrices. Its topology oscillates between the two captured faces. Thus, the colours and textures of one face can be applied to the shape of another. The installation’s algorithms have been designed to explore this liminal space where faces are both recognizable and unrecognizable at once.

ARTWORK LINK
Panégoptique | Jean-Philippe Cô

TALK
The Afterlife of the Self: Panégoptique and the Art of Obsolete Technologies
What happens when obsolete devices begin looking back at us? Panégoptique is an interactive installation built from discarded iPhones that captures visitors’ faces and merges them into uncanny, constantly shifting portraits. In this talk, artist and researcher Jean-Philippe Cô introduces the work and the doctoral research behind it. He will discuss how facial detection, algorithmic imagery and technological obsolescence shape our relationships with identity, surveillance and the material consequences of digital culture.

WEBSITE
https://djip.co