William Tremblay

Bio: From medieval armor maker, laser show engineer, and dev manager, he's now a "vibe coder of humans" by day and an esthesiologist by night. An obsessively omnivorous curiosity (and too little sleep) fuels his art, which employs everything from '70s electronics to AI, digital fabrication, and 3D printing—pushing experience until the magic smoke comes out. His work, exhibited at The Kitchen, EMPAC, Wired NextFest, ICA Boston, and beyond, embraces profound non-utility. A former director of COLLISIONcollective and curator of over 20 shows. Enthusiastically waiting for the future to start while studying ancient history. Reality Interrogator.

Statement: "I describe my work as esthesiology — the study and amplification of sensation. It’s not simply about creating sensory experiences, but about uncovering how perception itself is constructed, distorted, or hijacked. I work across media — video, robotics, code, installation, and generative tools — to explore how meaning emerges at the intersection of attention, embodiment, and system behavior. Much of my practice involves locating exploitable phenomena — patterns or visual attractors that behave like cultural spells, autoregressively generating their own logic and narratives. These artifacts don’t just reflect reality; they construct it. They emerge where systems — social, aesthetic, computational — have unconsciously committed to specific assumptions. When those assumptions are encoded in design language, software, or training data, their rules can be mapped and backdriven through targeted inputs. A phrase, an image, a gesture becomes a kind of linguistic exploit — a way to surface the latent logic beneath the surface. In projects like Useless Tools, I explore how meaning collapses under repetition — how visual culture, particularly in the age of algorithmic remixing, recycles aesthetics until they start to look like weapons. These objects aren’t functioning tools, and that’s the point. Non-utility is essential to me. Art is part of the human mind — and the mind can’t be forced to have utility. And if I ever fully know what I’m doing, I take that as a sign I’ve stopped making art."