An Electronic Legacy

 

François Bellabas's project An Electronic Legacy testifies to research in which artificial intelligence is now envisioned genealogically, through different generations of tools. The image, considered as data, has become the linchpin of a system in which humans move seamlessly between real and virtual spaces. The exhibition unfolds around a single motif: fire.

 

2016: the artist spends several weeks in California, where vast forest fires are sweeping the land. He photographs this mythical America in flames, often from the road. Churning skies, arid landscapes or residential suburbs, the lights are intense, supernatural, even apocalyptic.

 

2018: Machine Learning accelerates. The artist decides to submit to a first-generation AI (a GAN: Generative Antagonistic Network) the first 5,000 shots taken in California, in which fire is often but not always present. The machine recognizes this motif, which then contaminates the entire sequence presented. The image collides with the machine: glitches and other distortions accrue. This collection of vernacular images, whose aesthetic is now codified and dated, is nonetheless symptomatic of a relationship to memory, storage and compilation that has been largely altered by technological tools.

 

2023: ChatGPT, Dall-E and Mid-Journey stormed into our lives. The artist contemplates his hybridized database in the light of this new generation of technology and creates an immersive installation. The landscapes that make up Firestorm is coming are the result of prompts written by the artist after soaking up the first generation of fire images in his database. Thus, he creates a tracking shot in which the images are generated from textual material (the prompt). The landscapes that burn before our eyes reflect a world where dystopia has taken hold.

 

Audrey Illouz

 

Born 1989 in Mulhouse, France.
Lives and works in Paris, France.

 

François Bellabas is a graduate of ÉSAL ­– Metz ­and ENSP. His works have been presented as part of Art-o-rama (Marseille, 2017), the Biennale de l’Image Possible (Liège, 2018), Young Creation (Paris, 2020), 100 % L'EXPO (Paris, 2021), Rencontres d'Arles (2021), Palais Augmenté 2 (RMN-Grand Palais, Paris, 2022), Plat(t)form FotoMuseum Winterthur (2022). A winner of the CPIF residency programme, he has been working on the Escape from L.A. project since 2018, also supported by the Cnap and the CNC (DICRéAM). A technophile and engineer at heart, François Bellabas weaves links between the different levels of reality produced by and derived from the photographic medium and questions the image as data.

Born in 1978 in Paris, France.
Lives and works in Paris, France.

 

Her research deals with photography, and more specifically with the medium as the starting point of process-based approaches. She also carried out a research on Vito Acconci in the context of her work on Conceptual Art. She ran the art center Micro Onde and was associate curator at La Comédie de Caen. She teaches in art school, and she has been a contributor for many magazines. She curated the exhibitions Photography to the test of Abstraction (Micro Onde, Frac Normandie Rouen, Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, 2020-2021), Located Images (Micro Onde, 2019), Apparatus: Aurélie Pétrel, Marina Gadonneix (Comédie de Caen, 2015), The Appearance of Images (Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, 2013), Silêncio! (Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, 2008).