Jean-Christophe Yacono (yako) is a French-Canadian visual artist and multimedia director.

As a photographer and creator of interactive and digital works for small and very large screens and public spaces, his practice reveals images in motion, alive, contrasted and grainy, photographic or animated. He is interested in gesture as a generator of reaction and interaction, glitches or analog or digital artifacts, blurs and trans-disciplinary and transmedia co-creation.

His works and creations have been presented at the Centre Pompidou (CNAC), the Biennale d'Art Numérique de Montréal (BIAN) and the Elektra festival, the Festival International des Films sur l'Art (FIFA), the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC), the RIDM, the RVCQ, Cirque du Soleil, the ArTV studio and the Wilder facade at Place des Arts, at the 0x Society, Centrale Powerhouse in Montreal and FARM project galleries in Cape Cod, and in various local and international newspapers and magazines.

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yako questions place, fleeting and present moments, neat and variegated reality, and the trace left by gestures or movements on the sensor.

Trained in graphic design and photography at the École Supérieure des Arts Modernes in Paris, as well as in digital and interactive arts, yako has developed a keen interest in the new practices and writings of web art, multimedia and the performing arts.

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yako accepts and magnifies imperfections and mistakes, giving technology credit for co-creation and simplifying the photographic process to the extreme. Using an "all in the shot" technique, he captures images that evoke traces of memory more than they deal with the present, in a "grainy, dirty and fuzzy" reality inspired by Daido Moriyama and Michael Ackerman.

During his collaboration with Michael Snow and Jean Gagnon, when he discovered Plus Tard (1977), a museum installation featuring 25 photographs of well-known paintings, "seen in passing", blurred when the picture was taken, he understood the contribution of the site and of the visitor, who wanders rather than dives into the experience of the original work. Stripped of topicality and realism, and a little more abstract, these photographs act as a No Comment, leaving room for a possible awakening of the passer-by.

Upon encountering Stéphane Mallarmé's typographic poem "Un Coup de Dès" (1897), yako truly comprehended his fascination with the device (context, place, medium), the protocol (interaction, presence, user), and the random (chaos, unpredictable, present). Two affirmations particularly resonated with him, "Nothing will have taken place except the place" in which the entity of place/event occurs before returning to its initial state of place, and "A Throw of the Dice (never) will abolish Random. »

In collaboration with dancers Frédérick Gravel, Kimberley De Jong and Carol Prieur, yako delves into the reality of live art, seeking to capture it without freezing it, through series of "choreographic portraits" and research/co-creation that blend choreography and "moving" photography. The focus is on placing the sensor (point of view) at the center of the scenic device with the dancer, both participants in choreographic writing.

In his recent series, yako explores photographic narration. Drawing inspiration from the work of Duane Michals (staged, captions), Agence Topo (Photo Roman), or Chris Marker (photo film), he finds in the assembly of so-called still images or in the created interstice what Kouvelov described as an added meaning that the montage of two distinct sequences brings forth, e.g., one of a woman, one of a man. Between the two, the feeling of love arises.

yako develops his practice through projects such as "DIGITALSNOW" (2002), a DVD-Book created in collaboration with Michael Snow and published by the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Centre Pompidou, "WONDERLAND" (2008), an immersive theater performance and live audiovisual creation, the interactive installation "MUSICBOX 2" (2009) presented at BIAN, as well as the realization of short and medium-length films like "NOIRCEUR" (2020), "CAROL" (2021) with dancer Carol Prieur, and the series "GRAVEL(RE)WORKS" (2023), the architectural projection "GRAVEL@ Le Wilder" (2023), and the experimental film "FEAR IN MOTION" (2019) co-created with choreographer Fred Gravel.

yako presents several works on SuperRare, Foundation and Objkt.
He is alumny of the New Frontier Story Lab / Sundance Institute
He is a member of the Regroupement des Artistes en Arts Visuels as well as the artist-run centers VU and Agence TOPO. He is a co-signatory of the Manifeste pour les nouvelles écritures, a statement of intent on digital and interactive cultural production in Quebec.

"My images are blurry. They always have been. I have always been attracted to images in which time is perceived, a scenery that passes by, the feverishness of a body that moves or of a hand that apprehends. As if what attracts me is what I can't completely grasp. To perceive the passing of time rather than to look at the stop on an image, constrained,