French version available here.
Body, planet and intelligence. Inhuman alterities in artistic experience.
Article - - Azimuts n° 58 - Using artificial intelligence in art and design
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In this text, I draw some threads from the installation project L'économie des sols being developed: a robot produces an endless film from the observation of a landscape composed of more or less distinct forms made of sludge, oils, metals, etc., halfway between a wasteland and a machine. I sketch out how this work of fiction, by considering artificial intelligence no longer as a mirror of our capacities but as a form of otherness, reveals how we are constituted and linked to other, inhuman forms of otherness, because our existences depend on them and yet they remain occult, inaccessible and indifferent to our wills. The installation leads us to consider three forms of otherness.
1/ First, that of our bodies, to which we are led by the way this landscape suggests another history of machine morphogenesis, where it is no longer human intention that shapes matter, but the activity of the Earth itself. From the works of I. Andriessen to the reflections of D. Trigg, a troubling continuity emerges between mineral matter and that of our bodies, whose common alien origin makes us observe activity at the scale of cosmic time.
2/ Then that of the planet. The analysis of G. Chatonsky's fictions without narration or witness helps us envision how the machinic, impersonal and endless observation of terrestrial matter at work in the installation exceeds our capacities for perception and reasoning, making us pass, according to E. Thacker's categories, from a familiar Earth to an indifferent star.
3/ Finally that of thought, which in this world no longer seems to have any necessity and becomes just another material phenomenon. Through certain speculative philosophies, we are led to reconsider its nature: it becomes the expression of an original trauma caused by the separation of the organic from the inorganic, and would be animated by the desire to bring life back to its inorganic origin.