Marie-Eve Levasseur & Sabrina Ratté | CHANTIER IA | Cartes blanches & memos for the future
As part of its Chantier IA program, Sporobole presents this exhibition bringing together two artistic proposals from the 2024 residencies, by Marie-Ève Levasseur and Sabrina Ratté. Based on the figure of the card (divinatory and collectible), and both linked to the idea of anticipation and future projection, these works address our relationship with the future and lead us to rethink our impact within changing environments.
Cartes blanches & memos for the future
The figure on the card has several facets: playing cards, collectibles, divinatory, identity, graphic, etc. By definition, a card circumscribes a set of elements, gives indications and contains/transmits information, data, messages and symbols. On the other hand, the carte blanche delimits a space of freedom where anything can still be inscribe: it conveys a possible vision, carrying an element of the unforeseen, illuminated by a principle of potentiality. What we can’t predict is based on a state of penumbra: it’s hard to see what’s on the horizon, even if the data is there, ready to be integrated into the algorithm that would like to calculate a hypothetical world. Like the fool or the joker, we don’t know the future that will eventually and inevitably be inscribed on this card, and whose memo will certainly reach us, but without necessarily warning.
Both stemming from our Chantier IA 2024 residency programs, the artistic proposals presented in this exhibition follow in the wake of explorations with artificial intelligence (AI). Drawing on the figure of the card – collectible in the case of Marie-Ève Levasseur, and divinatory on Sabrina Ratté’s side – and anchored in the idea of anticipation and projection forward, the proposed works address our relationship with the future, and prompt us to rethink our impact within changing environments. True objects of mediation, these cards become a pretext for reflecting on a future whose unpredictability can be worrying. Without being predictive, the aim of this exhibition is to envisage the future by opening up spaces for dialogue and exchange, which the calculating power of AI can sometimes stimulate.
Marie-Ève Levasseur’s installation ecosystems of radical otherness (generative relationships) (2024-2025) brings together a series of elements revolving around the idea of interaction and interrelation between living and non-living entities and the link they maintain with their environment. Inspired by the world of insects, the AI-powered figures are cyborgs whose technological hybridity crystallizes in behaviors and abilities that are, a priori, non-existent in nature. This fictitious ecosystem, which emphasizes the relational aspect and the question of interdependence, is made up of typical specimens whose very specific identities are transposed in the form of collectible cards.
Here, the cards play a role of identity: subdivided into families identified under different symbiotic relationships – parasitism, mutualism and commensalism – and then formatted to evoke a more global relationship of belonging, they stage a small interrelational theater that is actualized through the installation’s videographic component. Connected to an AI system, this generative video simulates before our eyes a cyclical sequence of virtual (co)existences evolving in an environment obeying a metamorphic logic. If these cards are the main characters in a speculative counter-narrative, the future that emerges from them is inscribed in the margins created by algorithmic work.
Cyberdelia (2024) by Sabrina Ratté explores, on its side, the motif of the divinatory card. Freely inspired by the major arcana of the tarot, 22 cards “contain” as many short video sequences created with the help of an AI system. A sort of cyberdelic oracle – in reference to the encounter between cyberculture and the psychedelic subculture of the 1980s-1990s – the work invites visitors to draw a card, which then becomes a tool for co-reflection in relation to the questioning of the “consultant”, to borrow a term from the language of divination. This same card is then read via an RFID reader to reveal the associated video sequence, unfolding before our eyes the algorithmic perspective of AI.
The work takes a look at our world and its multiple mutations, evoking environmental transformations while drawing on paradigmatic elements that underpin our representations of the world. Strong figures – archetypes, themes or phenomena – such as obsolescence, utopia, symbiosis, luminescence, the abyss, the vortex, etc. are thus put forward. Unfolding by linking and untying ideas, the videos triggered by the cards are like micro-capsules revealing dreamlike visions that project us into a possible future. The “memos for the future” conveyed by these cards act as dazzling glitches, cracking the present.
Nathalie Bachand, curator
On March 7 at the exhibition opening, we’ll be celebrating the launch of 𝐸𝑠𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑒 no.139 – Blockchain
