Jean Décarie

Jean Décarie is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, and professor born in 1954 in Quebec. He studied music at the University of Montreal and began his career as an electroacoustic composer in the late 1970s. Known by his pseudonym Neam Cathod, he founded the Département d’Entraînement à l’Insanité (DEI), a collective of media artists interested in the manipulation of sound and image, often playing with overload, layering, and visual and auditory noise as a vehement critique of the media and television. Blind Light (1982) marks his entry into video creation, followed by He Was Alive, Now He’s Dead (1983) and Danlkû (1989). He was the technical director of PRIM (Productions et réalisations indépendantes de Montréal) from 1983 to 1989, working alongside artists such as François Girard, Luc Bourdon, and Istvan Kantor–a community of artists with whom he collaborated as a director, sound composer, technician in editing or special effects. His works, which have become landmarks in video art in Quebec, have been broadcast in Canada and internationally. He has been a professor at Université du Québec à Montréal since 1990. [Source: VOX, 2025]