September 2024 – work in progress
BEING ARTIFICIAL
For almost 30 years, I have been creating artworks staging artificial creatures programmed along principles reproducing fundamental processes of the living beings and in particular human beings. The programmed entities imitate life and being in its primal knots and forces (will, fear, pleasure, constraints, body, emotions, relationship to the other, etc…).
These processes work at simpler and deeper levels than the one of the associative and symbolic intelligence deployed by the generative artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, but they ask us the same existential questions — maybe in an even more frontal way — on the one hand on what makes us really human beings and on the other hand on the ways in which we will be able to form a society with these new artificial beings to come, and which are already there.
UNIVERSAL MACHINE
A computer is a Universal Machine in the sense of Alan Turing. That is, it is designed to be able to operate any describable process. Which does not prevent it from also running indescribable or random processes. That is, there is no known theoretical limit to the complexity or nature of the processes that can run on a computer.
For example, sensations like pain or pleasure, feelings and emotions like love, empathy or anger, energies like will, desire or fear, unconscious mechanisms like neuroses, culture or faith, mental processes like action planning, problem solving, scientific analysis, philosophical thinking, artistic creativity.. Whatever the exact meaning one can give to these words and concepts , they can exist within a computer.
Everything that may seem specific to living beings, to human beings, everything that exists and has existed, everything that is imaginable or even unimaginable can in theory exist in a computer. Not as fiction or representation, but as reality active in the world, in the same world as us. This is not my opinion, this is the definition of the Universal Machine.
Let’s prepare ourselves like for a long journey into the unknown…
ARTIFICIAL ARTISTS
At the crossroads of Art and AIs, it is often noted about generative AIs like ChatGPT that they only reproduce variations from the past and cannot demonstrate real creativity. Indeed, on the one hand, in their very designs, current generative AIs only exercise their “imagination” within their “latent space”, that is to say all of the variations of the data of which they have been fed, and on the other hand they only respond to the “prompts” of their users.
But it must be remembered that there is no theoretical limit to the nature or complexity of the processes that can operate in a computer, which is a universal machine, and this includes intention and will, desire and pain, awareness of oneself and others, subjectivity and introspection, neuroses and emotions, etc… The sources of human creativity remain mysterious but if some of its deep mechanisms are found integrated into AI, voluntarily or by pure emergence, it will be difficult to distinguish their creative processes from those of humans and thus to question their real creativity, except on dogmatic grounds.
We should expect to see new artistic approaches emerge entirely from artificial artists, and we can already wonder what they will look like and how they will question the world.
ARTIFICIAL CREATURES
Human beings are, above all, animals which are, above all, living beings. Among the fundamental mechanisms of human and non-human beings that I have explored for 30 years by programming them within artificial creatures, there are for example:
– intention (Le Pixel Blanc 1996)
– collective memory (Now Appear! 1997 with Alberto Sorbelli)
– imitation (Machiavel 1998 with Jean-Jacques Birgé, Sparks 1998 with Juha Pekka Marsalo, Myselves 2018 with Jean-Marc Matos and Marianne Masson)
– fear of the other (He Who Keeps the Worm 1998 with Joanna Preiss)
– expression through language (In the library 1995, Le Critique Automatique 1999, Deep Love 2017)
– verbal manipulation (Touche-moi! 1999, Buy Me! 2021)
– the freedom/constraint tension (Vexation #1 2000)
– the individual/group tension (22 Cubes Ensemble 2001, Nabazmob 2006 with Jean-Jacques Birgé, 100 Square Ensemble 2023)
– decision (the solo 2003)
– the attraction/repulsion tension (Threesome 2003)
– the game (Gameplay 2005 with Jean-Marc Matos and Anne Holst, Players of Games 2021)
– the body/external forces tension (with determination 2001, Christ Mourant 2006)
– the body/space tension (Facade Life 2007)
– the gaze of the other (Psychic 2007, Fractal Film 2013 with Delphine Doukhan)
– the relationship to the future (TIME SLIP 2007, Systemic 2010, La Chance 2017)
– the attraction/prohibition tension (Pixel Noir 2010, Carré Blanc 2015, Carré Noir 2016, Black Square 2016)
– crowd behavior (1000 pixels/n+141 2011 with Patrice Belin, War 2015)
– pleasure (Climax 2018 with Hortense Gauthier)
A large part of my artistic work therefore consists of delving into anthropology, ethology, psychology, philosophy, sociology, biology, neurology, physical science, etc. to extract deep mechanisms of being (human), reproduce them in the form of programs acting in real time within abstract artificial creatures and make artworks that I confront with spectators to question the human condition.
These mechanisms are linked to the body, emotions, the unconscious, intention and decision, relational modes, behaviors, natural reflexes, the capacity for abstraction and language, time, memory and the capacity for anticipation, physical forces, etc… That is to say at deeper and more fundamental infra-language levels than the level of the pure language of generative AIs.