Jocelyn Robert

Jocelyn Robert (born 1959) is a Canadian post-modern interdisciplinary artist from Quebec City, Quebec. In 1993, he co-founded the collective Avatar in Quebec City, which became the province's flagship in sound and electronic art. He was its first President and from 2004 to 2009 its artistic director. He also participated in the founding of the Méduse cooperative.

His work with Audio art and electronic art ranges from computer to video, sound and performance art. He explores themes of transference, memory and space-time. His visual artworks and videos have been exhibited internationally and his sound works can be found on more than 30 CDs. His texts have been published in Canada and abroad. His work has been the subject of several publications. He was a Professor in the Intermedia Department, Mills College, Oakland, California from 2003 to 2004, then in the School of Visual and Media Arts, University of Quebec in Montreal (2006-2008). Since 2008, he has been a Professor at the School of Art, Laval University and from 2012 to 2017, director at the School. His approach to the medium came from the plastic arts, and he sees them as parts of his intermedia works rather than as individual notes and beats.

He has said about his approach to sounds and images in visual art:The need to separate a work’s reading into "sounds", "images", and other things always surprises me. I remember a discussion I once had with the American artist Paul Demarinis. I mentioned to him an article in which a theoretician maintained that we should increase the number of human "senses". Essentially, this scholar said that the division of perception into five senses dated from the Middle Ages, and that it was time to bring it up to date. He himself proposed a minimum of fifty-four senses, in which, for example, there would be different designations for the touching of cold surfaces, texture, pressure, and so on. Paul replied that he understood the idea, but that it dated from after the Middle Ages and was more rooted in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth, and that, in his view, the number of senses today should be "one". This made me smile with relief.

Robert was one of the first artists in Québec to create connections between visual art and technology. In a number of works, Robert breaks or distorts the passage of time. In 2019, he presented Conjonctures at Expression Centre d'exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe. He has participated in many group shows from 1992 on in Canada and abroad, notably at Transmediale.02, the International Media Art Festival Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2002) and at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2004, 2008, 2008-2009).

Awards and grants Robert has received support in the form of grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ottawa; the Council of Arts and Letters of Quebec, Quebec; the Ministry of Culture and Communications, Quebec; and other institutions. In 2002, he won First prize in the Image category, Transmediale.02, in the International Media Art Festival Berlin, Berlin. In 2022, he received a Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.