TOPO_Trajectoires 20 ans de présence en art et littératures numériques

In 2018, TOPO is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and its 20th anniversary of involvement in creation and dissemination of digital art. The Montreal artist-run centre TOPO is a laboratory for digital writings and creations for web, performance, and installation spaces. Its mandate is to incubate, produce, and circulate original multimedia artworks that explore interdisciplinary and intercultural hybridizations in the digital arts.
It was through exploration of interactive narrative that the founders of TOPO – artists Michel Lefebvre and Eva Quintas – introduced TOPO to new-media circles in January 1998. A memorable ice storm had just ravaged Montréal when the FM network of Radio-Canada broadcasted a web-radio version of the three episodes of the photo-novel Liquidation, a first in Québec. This major pluri-media project, finalized in 2001 in the form of random fiction on CD-ROM, gave a foretaste of the organization’s orientations: collective creation, a multidisciplinary focus, exploration of various supports and narrative forms for new media, and extension of practices on the network into the public space and vice versa. 
TOPO presents a journey through 20 years of experimentation with the narrative potentials of interactive media through a selection of collective web artworks produced by more than 100 artists from the visual and media arts, theatre, audio, and literature. To this body of work have gradually been added performances and installations highlighting different disciplines, along with various staging processes and technological devices. The goal is to explore the dynamics of the back-and-forth between what is on screen and what is off screen.

(source: ELO 2018 website)