I'm Alex Gagnon, an independent interdisciplinary artist-researcher based in Mont-Saint-Hilaire, Québec. For thirty years my practice has moved between painting (analog and digital), ambient and experimental sound design, and novelistic and philosophical writing — every project carried by its own conceptual scheme, all of it documented in public repositories under vocabularies I define myself.

This account — antiface, my handle for over a decade — is the workshop: Python tools, technical specifications, documentation systems, research apparatuses, and the occasional program that actually runs.

• ORCID: 0000-0001-7752-0248 — the CV. If an output was worth a DOI, it's listed there.
• Zenodo community: The Historiotheque — citable releases from the art operation.

• Findability: alexgagnon.com — including the controlled hashtag vocabulary I use as a breadcrumb trail across everything I publish.
• Repository index: github.com/antiface/Index

• POST-ARCHIVAL — the main project, in two branches: The Experimental Novel (all novelistic writing) and The Deep-Archive Project (software, philosophy formalizations, archival experiments).
• The Refcards-Project — fifteen years in the making: a simplified library card catalog for what I call atoms of knowledge — basically a simplified World Wide Web running locally, after Otlet's Mundaneum, HyperCard, and the online library catalog. To be clear, I haven't invented anything new; I wrote a technical specification that blends the sources into one system.
• The Historiotheque — my art studio, sound-design lab, and research practice treated as cultural software, with Official Releases under semantic versioning. Org: Historiotheque.
• Atmospherics Theory — a unified theory of atmosphere: the air around us treated as a continuous, resonant field you can listen to, record, and think with — grounded in years of daily field recordings of ambient sound.
• Noise Field Theory / Signal Science — a noise-based and a signal-based view of the universe and everything in it, including the "noise field" digital painting form.
• The Switchboard Method — how the work actually gets done: I rotate across projects in alternating 15-minute intervals, so nothing stalls and nothing depends on remembering where I left off. Everything gets logged automatically as I go.
• Phenomenology of Art-Research Practice (in progress) — a first-person study of what art-research feels like from the inside: the workspace, the tools within reach, the daily rhythms of making — examined the way phenomenologists examine lived experience.

After a few years away from serious coding, I'm back into Python — this time working with LLMs and agentic AI to build more complex software than I ever managed alone. The guiding idea is Cultural Software: programs designed as cultural objects, made for my repositories and everything around them. The daily discipline hasn't changed: hours spent reading other people's code on GitHub as deliberate practice — reading code is too often overlooked. On the desk: Fluent Python, CPython Internals, Neural Networks from Scratch.

• Bluesky (main hub): @antisignal
• X: @antisignal
• Website: alexgagnon.com
• Substack: antisignal.substack.com
• Medium: @antisignal
• Academia.edu: Alex Gagnon — essays and books
• Mastodon: @antisignal
• Music & sound: songs on YouTube · songs on SoundCloud · sound-design blog on Tumblr
• Discourses: Post-2015 Discourses by A.G. on YouTube

Every year for over a decade, I've published an "Official Declaration of Production-Year" — forward-looking statements about what I'll be working on, written one to two years in advance. Instead of a retrospective, I try to make my daily practice dependable, and the declarations leave an audit trail that keeps me accountable. Canonical versions are being ported into the Historiotheque repository; until those ports are final, every link below goes to the original Medium version.

• 2016–2017: Production-Year 2016–2017
• 2017–2018: Official Declaration of the Production-Year 2017–2018
• 2018–2019: Official Declaration of the Production-Year 2018–2019
• 2019–2020: Official Declaration of Production-Year 2019–2020
• 2020–2021: Official Declaration of Production-Year 2020–2021
• 2021–2022: Official Declaration of Production-Year 2021–2022
• 2022–2023: Official Declaration of Production-Year 2022–2023
• 2023–2024: Official Declaration of Production-Year 2023–2024
• 2024–2025: Official Declaration of Production-Year 2024–2025
• 2025–2026: Official Declaration of Production-Year 2025–2026
• 2026–2027: Official Declaration of Production-Year 2026–2027
• 2027–2028: Official Declaration of Production-Year 2027–2028
• 2028–2029: Official Declaration of Production-Year 2028–2029

Most of my repositories don't contain code — they contain ideas: conceptual systems, art-research projects, novels. The documentation is the practice. Logging, specifying, and archiving aren't the record of the work; they're the work.

⚡ Fun fact: I'm an interdisciplinary artist-researcher — that's what I was in my previous life, before programming. I'm well into my second decade of code and it's funny: all that time in, I don't have much to show for it. What I have is fluency — I read and write Python the way you'd read a newspaper, internals and all. No major shipped projects; just the daily practice.

This profile and its contents are part of an ongoing research-creation project exploring the intersections of art, history, and philosophy. All works are offered in good faith as contributions to public discourse and aesthetic reflection. The responsibility for interpretation remains with each participant in that dialogue.

A.G. (c) 2026. All Rights Reserved.