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Opening reception : open to all
Talks : limited seating

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently dominated by industrial imperatives aiming at the automation of cognitive and creative processes. On the margins of this fast industrialization marked by an hegemonic and normative culture, contemporary art appropriates and redefines these parameters in a reflexive manner, deploying original and critical approaches through the materiality of AI itself. In these works, AI is more than a tool or medium, it is an autonomous, performative, and transformational agential material that unfolds at the edge of human and machine.

Under the lens of these artistic proposals lie issues that deserve attention and reflection. Fed by the data we generously generate on a daily basis, AI systems tend to reproduce the biases, stereotypes, as well as colonialist and normative worldviews of Western societies. Our relationship with automated images is also culturally oriented and connoted, and so is the capitalist logic of optimization, efficiency and control that underpins these systems, leaving little room for benevolence and care for others. To add to the dystopian nature of our relationship with AI, the ability of these systems to imitate humans via deepfakes, synthetic voices and large language models (LLMs) threatens the foundations of democratic societies in the post-truth era.

This exhibition shows how AI-based art can step outside of itself, how it can exceed its situation and become the vehicle of unthought imaginations, catalyzing a critical and speculative reflection on AI itself. In line with this initial intention, the works presented here undermine the extractivist and homogenizing tendencies of mainstream AI through diverse strategies of algorithmic détournement and reappropriation.

Curators: Nathalie Bachand & Sofian Audry

Generative title : Sofian Audry