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Founded in Montreal in 2010, new media art studio Iregular creates interactive audiovisual installations, large-scale sculptures, architectural projections and scenographies, with a focus on interactive and immersive experiences. At the crossroads between art and technology, these artworks experiment with geometry, light, sound, typography, mathematics, algorithms, communication protocols, AI, and machine learning. Iregular also develops its own proprietary technologies.

My Projects

  • ANTIBODIES

    As we are becoming increasingly jaded and disconnected from other people, ANTIBODIES reflects on how detached we are during video conference calls – today’s imposed form of social gatherings. It also questions our vulnerability in the face of these overpowering platforms that force us to give up our privacy and the intimacy of real-life interactions we once took for granted. ANTIBODIES is an interactive experience that mimics this phenomenon and creates a similar virtual get-together. As people join, a system tracks the elicited facial expressions of participants, responding with overlaid visual and audio patterns. After each interaction, people’s recorded experiences are added to a gallery of disembodied human beings. Web Version ANTIBODIES is a hybrid artwork: initially taking the form of a website anyone can join at any time, it naturally developed into a physical installation for public spaces too as lockdown measures progressively eased. So far, more than 20,000 people from 48 different countries have taken part in the online experience accessible here: www.antibodies.webcam. Both formats use CURSOR, a proprietary technology combining optics, AI and machine learning in the tracking features. ANTIBODIES is a reflection and critique that clearly manifests the intersect.

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  • As Water Falls

    From all earthly elements, water is the one that unites us all best. It is at the basis of life in all its forms, and embodies various concepts crucial to our very existence: vitality, continuity, sustainability, purification, and growth. As a new media art studio that often explores nature-related themes, it is no surprise that our attraction to water reverberates in many of our works. AS WATER FALLS is a virtual interactive waterfall that aims to explore different aspects of water and its metaphorical concepts, shedding a light on our relationship with this precious element. A large-scale installation taking the form of a cascade, the piece reacts to mobile phone flashlights. Added mirrors, real water, and vibrating motors are also included to make for an even more immersive experience. Sounding and looking like a big natural waterfall in the middle of a closed physical room, people will swiftly realize as they get closer that the water flow is actually a plethora of objects and concepts that are sure to pique their curiosity. With inherent instructions embedded within the piece itself, participants will easily understand how to engage and will embark on the experience by pointing their mobile flashlight toward the different visuals displayed.

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  • Control No Control

    CONTROL NO CONTROL is a big LED cube that reacts to everything that touches it and every movement performed on its surface. Streamlined patterns and generative sound emerge as interaction occurs. Allowing 48 people to participate at the same time, the experience is extremely intuitive, leading to quick audience engagement and prolonged interactions. A sort of socio-digital experiment, the piece explores the relationship between participants and interactive installations. It tests the artwork’s ability to intrinsically “instruct” and delegate the final audiovisual result to the audience that ends up gaining control of the piece. After presenting it many times across continents and cultures, CONTROL NO CONTROL revealed that people all over the globe tend to behave the same way around the cube, and all seemed to spend a lot of time engaging.

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  • DICE

    Games are metaphors for life. They teach us about success, failure, learning from mistakes, working with others, discipline and rigor. When we were set to create a piece inspired by the power of play, we were impelled to explore that invisible force that pervades all game experiences: luck. As if tossed by a giant, DICE is a large-scale interactive sculpture comprising five white cubes floating on the Arizona canal. This five-part experience invites up to 60 visitors of the Canal Convergence Festival to simultaneously play with their own shadows. Cameras placed in front and behind each cube track human bodies and turn them into projections of shadows that are drawn and redrawn by people’s unpredictable movement. This combined with random generative software creates infinitely different living artworks that are never the same.

  • Frames exhibition

    FRAMES is an exhibition combining 4 artworks that were created at different moments of Iregui’s artistic career. A snapshot of the artist’s evolution over time, the 4 pieces are connected in form, as they all include a frame in the design. They are however very different in concept, execution, and engagement value, and when all presented together, they take on a whole other layer of meaning.

  • Mental Maps

    James Duncan’s numerous watercolors and sketches of urban landscapes shaped the vision that outsiders carried about Montreal, sculpting their minds with mental images of the city. What would the world look like through the eyes of someone whose only reality is molded by an artist’s visual representation? Inspired by this thought, we compiled many of James Duncan’s pieces from the McCord Stewart Museum collection and fed them to an artificial intelligence. We then visualized how that AI envisioned the world after solely being exposed to the artist’s work. The result is MENTAL MAPS: an immersive video installation of a mind’s interpretation of reality. Layers of landforms and topographies make up this imagined universe, where visitors find themselves entering the mind of the machine and becoming a part of the scenery. As they move through the space, their shadows hide and reveal new realities, continually building on each person’s unique experience. MENTAL MAPS acts as the epilogue of the McCord Stewart Museum’s exhibition titled “Becoming Montreal: The 1800s Painted by Duncan”.

  • NEST

    NEST is a sound-focused digital artwork that changes the way we are used to experiencing interactive art. Upon entering the room, people notice a buzzing sound coming from a colony of insects flying in harmony. As they curiously get closer to the central NEST, their human presence disrupts the natural peace which activates the experience: it is the insects’ turn to disturb the visitors until they step away from their habitat. This project is the first to use SONAR, our new sound location technology. Combining our proprietary tracking system, directional ultrasonic speakers, robotic arms, and a very specific sound design, we can now create sound experiences that follow participants and expose every person in the very same room to a different sonic reality.

  • Omnipresence

    OMNIPRESENCE is an audiovisual interactive mise en abyme that highlights technology’s ability to curate our digital persona. The piece invites visitors to move around a digital infinity mirror that endlessly multiplies their reflection using video feedback. Before projecting the recorded video of the moving participants back onto the screen, software tweaks some of the image properties distorting the perception of time and space. Whether they are upside-down images, delayed projections, reversed recordings or simply true untampered reflections, the infinitely mirrored body images lose their symmetry and seem to move at their own will, disconnected from the audience members initially triggering them.

  • Our Common Home

    At a time we’re feeling the repercussions of the global environmental crisis more than ever before, OUR COMMON HOME fuses art and interaction technology to send a message about the urgency of climate action. OUR COMMON HOME is an interactive public art exhibition that uses state-of-the-art AI and computer vision technologies to send one unified message about the impact of our individual decisions on the planet. Four interactive installations can be physically explored on giant digital monoliths spread across cities, while a fifth collective artwork extends the experience online.

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  • River

    Iregular proposed RIVER, an installation inspired by the horizontal shape of the canvas provided, adopting an organic form alluding to a water stream. It is created using a 11mx2m LED mesh sculpture and a software infinitely producing generative content. Visible from the outside through big glass windows, the piece “listens” to all the activities happening within the bank and reacts to the sounds by creating wave-like visual textures mimicking water ripple effects. RIVER is permanently installed in the branch since April 2019. Rivers are reflections of the towns, cities, and villages they run through. Similarly, this installation reflects the environment of the branch it is in. A more active environment creates a more active RIVER. Playing with the mic sensibility, the piece only processes the sounds inside the bank during the busy days, but ventures outdoors in the street surroundings as things calm down between the inner walls at night.

  • Solstice

    SOLSTICE is a monumental interactive installation, inspired by solar and planetary movements that invites the audience to take control of the environment around them. Throughout the experience, SOLSTICE disturbs your perception of the surroundings, making you lose sense of where you actually are, somewhere between reflections, parallel dimensions and reality.

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