Sophie Auger is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and visiting professor at the UQAM School of Design.
She works across video installation, hybrid publishing, photography, and circuit bending.
Her research focuses on the beliefs and superstitions generated by digital technologies, and on how their invisible systems shape the ways we see, interpret, and inhabit the world.
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Coded on June 9, 2026.
UNKNOWN ART INDEX
BOOKED, MUU Contemporary Art Center, Helsinki
October 2021
Unknown Art Index brings together an augmented reality experience, a printed publication, and a web archive. The project focuses on works attributed to unknown artists in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in order to examine questions of provenance, archiving, and institutional authority.
The augmented reality experience, Unknown Guided Tour, offers a path through the museum connecting a selection of objects whose authorship is absent from the archive. Using speculation as a research method and critical fabulation as a narrative strategy, the project imagines a shared provenance for these works and constructs the mythology of a single fictional artist to whom they all might have belonged. Developed from gaps and silences within the archive, these narratives highlight the constructed nature of historical accounts and the mechanisms through which some presences are preserved while others disappear.
This inquiry continues in Unknown Art Index, a printed and digital archive cataloguing works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art attributed to artists identified as “unknown”. Using the museum’s open-access data, these objects are paired with cryptographic tokens recorded on the blockchain. The project thus places two systems of provenance in parallel: that of the museum and that of the blockchain. In both cases, objects are documented, catalogued, and made traceable while remaining separated from their creators.
By bringing together institutional archives, speculative narrative, and cryptographic ledgers, Unknown Art Index examines how technologies participate in the construction and erasure of the value of artworks.
BOOKED, MUU Contemporary Art Center, Helsinki
October 2021
Unknown Art Index brings together an augmented reality experience, a printed publication, and a web archive. The project focuses on works attributed to unknown artists in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in order to examine questions of provenance, archiving, and institutional authority.
The augmented reality experience, Unknown Guided Tour, offers a path through the museum connecting a selection of objects whose authorship is absent from the archive. Using speculation as a research method and critical fabulation as a narrative strategy, the project imagines a shared provenance for these works and constructs the mythology of a single fictional artist to whom they all might have belonged. Developed from gaps and silences within the archive, these narratives highlight the constructed nature of historical accounts and the mechanisms through which some presences are preserved while others disappear.
This inquiry continues in Unknown Art Index, a printed and digital archive cataloguing works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art attributed to artists identified as “unknown”. Using the museum’s open-access data, these objects are paired with cryptographic tokens recorded on the blockchain. The project thus places two systems of provenance in parallel: that of the museum and that of the blockchain. In both cases, objects are documented, catalogued, and made traceable while remaining separated from their creators.
By bringing together institutional archives, speculative narrative, and cryptographic ledgers, Unknown Art Index examines how technologies participate in the construction and erasure of the value of artworks.
Augmented reality experience, printed publication, and web publication.
