Profiling: Anne Le Troter

For the fourth iteration of Profiling, Anne Le Troter invites participants to consider medical profiling and how our medical data can be used in the pharmaceutical industry.

Who has trouble swallowing the pill? is a multi-dimensional work raising awareness on how patients participate, knowingly or not, in how their medical data is utilized. This questionnaire prompts participants to consider all aspects of what goes into the formation of pill medication. Through experiencing this work, one will discover that pills are not simply designed to treat health ailments, instead they are plagued by complexities wrapped up in capitalist motives. Rather than asking questions directly, Le Troter rewrote a classic moment from the 1999 film, The Matrix. Beginning with a deepfake audio from the scene where Morpheus meets Neo and hands him two drugs: one red, the other blue. In this story, Neo refuses to swallow a drug he doesn't know and asks Morpheus for guarantees. Morpheus tells the story of the Matrix through that of William Brockedon, artist and inventor of the tablet. Gradually, it becomes clear that everything is connected.

About the Artist

Artist Anne Le Troter mixes sound installation, performance, literature and poetry. After writing two books, she turned her attention to the place of speech in the workplace through several sound pieces. Invited by the Pernod Ricard Foundation, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, she has initiated writing cycles on the notion of biography, fiction and utopia, around the question of our modes of reproduction. 

With a particular interest in the question of care, health and possible bridges between the artistic and medical worlds, Anne Le Troter has carried out research on artists who have participated in notorious medical advances. Those she calls «volunteers» - like the artists William Brockedon, inventor of the tablet, and Louise Hervieu, originator of the health record - are also representatives of the condition of male and female art workers.

Profiling

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This summer, we invite you to join us for our remote summer series, Profiling, which will present five artist-designed questionnaires or forms that reconsider how we present ourselves through online profiles, or how the data we input shapes our identity.

Online profiles have been folded into the fabric of our identities, but can we take a step back and reconsider the information we are asked to provide that construct our online digital selves? Alternatively, can we analyze the forms and questionnaires that structure the way we are forced to identify ourselves? These profiles have increasingly become a way of establishing interpersonal relationships. We are forced to fit ourselves into a persona that shapes how we interact and are perceived by others. We check boxes that limit our personality and are thus placed into a category that we might not even identify with. In this series, artists will take a deeper look at the structures that collect data that inform our profiles, rethink what shapes our identities, and expose how the data being collected is used by these invisible entities.

A new iteration will be released on the List Center website every other Wednesday, from June 26 – August 21, 2024. Participants are invited to engage with the series asynchronously throughout the season. 

Profiling is organized by Emily Garner, Senior Manager Campus and Public Programs, with Cassidy Westjohn, Program Coordinator. 

Participating Artists: Lauren Lee McCarthy, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Mary Stephanson, Mariam Suhail, Anne Le Troter.