Mont-réel

French artist Eva Clouard’s installation Mont-réel (2015) was displayed for Montreal’s “Art Souterrain” Festival 2015 within the Palais des Congrès de Montréal. The installation features a television monitor that shows a map of the streets of Montreal with the artist’s whereabouts tracked in real time. By using an easily downloadable GPS app on her phone, Clouard’s project generates questions about how much of our daily lives, from are physical location to our private conversations, can be tracked through our personal electronic devices such as cell phones? It also begs the question of who has access to this personal data and how this information might be used? Offering herself as the subject of the surveillance, Clouard plays with the presumed boundaries of private and public life, and the ways in which our own everyday devices can be used as an agent of surveillance. The title plays on the location-style tracking nature of the work, somewhere between Montreal and mon réel (my reality).