This interview was conducted in French on April 12, while Télofossils was still being installed. The finished work is on view until Monday, May 18. Find more info + map in the listing. ***

: Yes. If you don’t mind, I’m going to keep gluing things and working on the installation while we talk.

: And we’ll be here for two more weeks. Our exhibition opened on April 25. The Unicorn Centre For Art just opened, this is only the second show they’ve had here.

: Yes, we spent time at Paul Devautour’s Ecole Offshore, and the work we showed in the Bazaar is actually the prototype for this exhibition, titled Protofossils. It’s pretty coherent, this next one is Télofossils. We had an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taiwan, then the Institut Français got in touch. They had wanted to work with us for a while. It was interesting to do this project in Beijing given China’s strategic situation. In twenty years, no one will be able to live here. The ground will be too polluted. Dominique and I never like to mount the same exhibition twice, that’s no fun. And since the works are so large, we can’t transport them.

: Yes, and we always work with the materials we find. So the starting point for this work is relatively simple: living species are born, and they die. We are a living species, so we will eventually disappear. Not only because of the pollution — there’s no moralistic stance behind all this. Individuals within a species die, and the entire species will also go extinct at some point.

: We have the tendency to always bring things back to us, to humans, to the pollution we’re creating, but that’s a very anthropocentric point of view.

: Exactly, a disease...

: Yes, anything. We’re going to disappear. And once the last human is gone, something will arrive on Earth — or might already be here, it doesn’t matter — and it's going to excavate and discover everything we’ve produced. Those millions and millions of objects will be all that is left. The planet will be haunted by these millions of objects, a plastic bag will live on longer than any human being. What will this being, this non-human counterpart, deduct from this plastic bag? We want to put people in this strange and ambiguous position of contemplating their own extinction. We want them to observe their present by thinking about a time in the future where there are no longer any humans. It’s fascinating. While making this project, we’ve become aware of this entire field of research around media archaeology, with people like Jussi Parikka. Dominique and I don’t always work together, we also have our own practices, and in one of Dominique's previous projects from 2011, Archéologie Mondialisée [Globalized Archaeology], she fossilized items from dollar stores, actually often made in China, to show that something that costs a dollar today might become something rare and precious in 2000 years. And I’ve been working on the themes of destruction and the end of the world since 2001. I’m interested in what will remain from this utopia we’re in, that wants to believe that the digital technologies we’re using are immaterial. Dominique Sirois - "Archéologie Mondialisée"

: Yes, exactly. Machines are becoming reading devices, but they don’t work like hieroglyphs. If you find a CD in the desert in a hundred thousand years, good luck trying to read it! It’s an object that becomes indescribable. It raises a lot of questions on the way we delegate the act of reading to machines, which make all future readings impossible, or very difficult. Again, the point of this project is to bring people to reflect on the present, by positioning the work so far in the future. The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st will be remembered as the Internet era, that’s for certain.

: Yes, the post-internet movement worked hard for this and now we’re finally there. We take it for granted, we live online but we have absolutely no idea how it all works. One way to solve that problem is to project ourselves well into the future, in order to ask ourselves where we are now. So in this main room is the archaeological dig, with a video projection on the back wall. DS: The idea is to add traditional objects into the mix, these are fossils that could already have existed millions of years ago. It complexifies the different layers of thought. So here we’re using a roof tile, a piece of coal. We went to a refurbished electronics store and bought all of this. GC: Here, everything is reused and repurposed, it still has value. DS: People can make a living in the underground recycling markets.

: They’re repurposing the tiniest pieces of copper, but it’s really dangerous.

: They work with their bare hands! I’ve been watching documentaries and news videos on these places, it’s scary.

: And since it’s newly developed land, they must be finding lots of things. We’d also like to go to Inner Mongolia to see all the mineral extraction and mining industries in Baotou. GC: I want to go film the runoff lake. We didn’t want to directly take inspiration from these issues, but I think doing this project in China definitely makes sense. The Chinese are starting to gain consciousness of the environment they are subjected to, and that they place themselves in. China’s role is absolutely critical, and I think the agreements Obama set in motion are very smart, it’s the beginning of a solution. China could make decisions and enforce solutions faster than many parliamentary European governments. "The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust", Baotuo, Inner Mongolia

: The only difference is that it feels like going back in time ten years in terms of speed, it’s like our old dial-up connections. DS: And it’s unreliable, you have to keep changing servers... GC: I can see lots of entries and exits from my computer. Pirates, zombies… I have a copy of a software the NSA made called Carnivore, that monitors that kind of traffic, and it’s clearly all tapped. DS: Is it surveillance?

: Of course. Your machines become zombies here, connecting to other machines and using those connections for other tasks.

: Not really, we feel totally free to do whatever we want. We shouldn’t delude ourselves, everything is surveilled in the West as well.

: It’s going to Wuhan next, as part of Festival Croisements, then we’re headed back to Montreal before going on another residency in Belgium... DS: ...on a related project... GC: About data centers.

: They are human-generated images. I hacked a printer to turn it into a machine that I can attach my arm to. I hold a pen and the machine guides the drawings. The images it prints via my arm are sourced from an image-generating software that creates virtual cities.

: Yes, it’s upstairs! GC: These images are outputs from viruses. The idea is very simple: I don’t install any antivirus software on the computer, but I still make sure to protect the system, so the computer’s not connected to a wifi network. I install lots of viruses, spyware, worms, zombie machines, and so on, then I use Carnivore to gather data, then I run it through a script in Photoshop to create these very calming images. Grégory Chatonsky - "Exploit"

: Yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about the 19th century, the 1830s to 1870s, Jonathan Crary’s work and all that. This piece touches on spirit photography, and the magic side of computers. It’s also about taking viruses for what they are, living organisms, and putting them in a zoo of sorts. Another computer will be showing the color progressions in real time. *** Télofossilsis is on view at Unicorn Centre for Art until Monday, May 18, 2015.