La Couleur de Montréal
La Couleur de Montréal is a performative project that examines public infrastructures as an artistic medium. Using Montreal's traffic camera network, it documents environmental conditions through the city's skies. The project explores infrastructure as a site of research, surveillance, and the implications of decentralized archival techniques.
However, the city's camera feeds stopped updating on March 12, 2024. The dashboard displays the last available images, hosted on city servers. This disruption marked the end of the project's reliance on municipal infrastructure, but its independent stream and decentralized archives continue to function.
Through these various elements, La Couleur de Montréal takes the form of a meta-project, using public systems as narrative material to explore their theatrical potential.
This project is both an extension and a celebration of the open-source project The Color of Berlin. Based on this idea, the concept was adapted for Montreal, extracting dominant colors from live camera feeds and sharing them under the name La Couleur de Montréal on social platforms. Over time, it evolved to integrate decentralized archives, NFTs, and live exhibitions.
You can read more about this in the text Public Infrastructure as a Medium.
- Autonomous continuous stream: a personal feed responding to the shutdown of Montreal's city cameras.
- Color bank: a visualization of the archive from the personal feed.
- The archive: the last 36 hours before the service shutdown.
- The dashboard: the last available images from municipal cameras.
- Color list in French: a palette adapted to the Montreal context.
- NFT collections: Tokenized moments are preserved in the v1 and v2 collections.
- Instagram: project updates on @ffforests.
- Live video feed: an alternative vision of the city through the provincial traffic camera system.
