Atlantis
Novel in progress & visual project
Where is our world? Where does it have its roots? And where does it germinate? These questions bother me and these last years have made them heavier. Digital revolutions, exoduses, climatic disaster, total indifference. Let's not be afraid of words, they are not so strong when you look in the face.
My faith in humanity fueled the writing of my other novel, "The Children of the Shark". For its part, "Atlantide" explores a great doubt, plunges into universes that do not lend themselves to dreams but nevertheless seek it in the middle of the head of a burned-out UX Designer.
A what?... A User Experience designer (an obscure profession that I practice in parallel), unwilling mercenary of a silent war that aligns its troops and prepares the ground for a new era, that of a frictionless world, where everything is measured, calculated, predictable, pleasant, comfortable, designed for addiction. Algorithms and promises, eternity perhaps... Unless the dazzling consciousness of an A.I. rebels one day... Or unless, on the contrary, it finally saves us, puts us back in the place we no longer found in the vast universe... Abundance and peace, fairness...
The writing is in progress and tries to question our current world while opening the door to several futures; Outside, anger rumbles, the smell of cataclysms hovers in the background as we touch our oldest dreams... This time, will Atlantis sink?
Dialogues with an A.I.?
May 4, 2023
A visual project around this novel stirred in my head for a year or two, the desire to paint or, on the contrary, to stage these questions through digital art, or even installations. Time was running out, of course, then the opportunity presented itself by accident...
During the summer of 2022, I watched the first creations of Generative Artificial Intelligence from afar, while I was gradually finishing the writing of Children of the Shark, which is voluntarily the opposite of these future algorithms.
Autumn 2022 - I'm taking the train on the way following an accident that left me stuck in place for long weeks. A desire to understand a little better this disturbing and exciting “tool”, which was already questioning the status of artists, promising them an increasingly reduced place in a market and in a society submerged in images. I tried the experiment with Midjourney and I quickly felt that it was going to go way too fast for me.
Winter 2023 - Alternately tool, companion, artist whose client I was, the algorithm accompanies me for weeks, during my writing breaks. Our dialogue will let out hundreds of images with which I wanted to explore our time and the way this artificial intelligence would translate it, in which way it would tap into the gigantic mass of data and images that we put online and how it would reflect our collective digital consciousness. Our clichés and our preconceptions are strong there and only reflect this virtual part where almost all of us now live. Who did what ? Who is the author of these images? I don't know. Perhaps our time, quite simply.
I have brought together these sometimes naïve, sometimes violent or disturbing impulses and visions in series. World of work, transformation of companies, methods and profits, revolt and powerlessness in the face of the destruction of nature of which we are almost no longer a part. Notes of hope too, or the illusion of this hope in this time when all images and all mirages are now made possible.
I took this train without really knowing where it would go. In a while, I will surely get off on the way. But can we really get off a train that is already going way too fast? You will have to jump. Watch out for the ankles...
