Mike Pelletier Canadian Artist, Dutch Artist, Lives and works in Amsterdam

Mike Pelletier works at the intersection of desk and computer. He works across table and seat — and if a practice is only ever the sum of the surfaces it rests on, then his is a philosophy of furniture. The seat is an Aeron chair scavenged from a dumpster outside a coworking space, redeemed from disposal and pressed back into thought. He put rollerblade wheels on it. The wheels allow him to glide across disciplines, and to grind down some sick perspectives, because a perspective is just a vantage you were willing to roll toward. Coworking spaces, he maintains, are one of two possible businesses that can exist in a city. The other is a gym. Both are temples to optimization, and Mike Pelletier will never set foot in either. His work straddles the boundary between alone and in the attic — the two states he believes are required to make anything honest. The work leaves the attic, funnels through file-sharing links, and splatters itself unceremoniously onto gallery walls in places around the world, most of which he has never visited. The image arrives where the body cannot, and he has stopped being sure which of them is the real one.

The work on the screen consumes thirty to fifty watts — probably less than the spotlights trained on a single painting. He keeps returning to this figure, because it raises the only question that matters: how much energy is a thought permitted to cost before it stops being worth thinking?

His work asks whether any of this was ever a good idea. His work answers no. It exists because he is good at computer; it exists because computer is bad; and somewhere in that contradiction is the whole of it. To be fluent in a thing you distrust is the most modern condition there is.

Look, a bird. You deserve a nice glass of water.

Mike Pelletier's work appears on the Know Your Meme page for the uncanny valley — his single, genuine claim to fame, and a fitting one, since the uncanny valley is precisely the place where the almost-real becomes unbearable. All the blogs that featured his work between 2014 and 2016 no longer exist. The walls of the valley collapsed, and the work lies buried under the rubble, which is perhaps the most natural resting place for anything that was only ever made of light.

His work is rooted in the tooted, engaging with the shifting nature of things — or with the shift KEy. He has never been entirely certain there is a difference.