Apophenia, Interruptions — Artistes et intelligences artificielles au travail — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 18 days: September 25, 2024 → January 6, 2025

Following the symposium The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be during the 2023 edition of Moviment, this exhibition marks the second chapter of a three-year collaboration between KADIST and the Centre Pompidou. This exhibition explores the intersections between artistic creation and artificial intelligence through six artists’ installations, bringing together new commissions and recent productions.

Curators:
Joseph del Pesco (International Director, KADIST) and Marcella Lista (Chief Curator, New Media Collections Department, Centre Pompidou — Musée national d’art moderne)

Artists:
Éric Baudelaire, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Auriea Harvey, Interspecifics, Agnieszka Kurant, Ho Rui An

While generative AI promises to transform artistic research by offering new tools, it has also had a profound impact on the way we view images and works of art. The term “apophenia” was coined in 1958 to help diagnose schizophrenia, and refers to a cognitive tendency to perceive meaningful links between disparate and unrelated elements, a disorder that can be compared to the “false connections” that appear as a result of the pattern-recognition processes at the heart of generative artificial intelligence. These aberrant processes, characterized by a need for algorithmic efficiency and flaws in the coherence of the source data, are seen here as a fertile starting point for artistic research.

The exhibition sheds light on some of the implications of generative AI as it emerges from the shadows of the ‘black box’. The included artworks still focus primarily on the role of human intelligence, and the development and articulation of creative processes and conceptual frameworks, but have become entangled in these technologies even going so far as to modify the AI systems themselves. Whether reflecting on collective memory as cataloged in national archives, an experimental investigation into the end (and AI-powered future) of grand narratives, a future projection of works of art not yet produced by an artist, the veil of a dreamworld filtered through AI as a way to recount an intimate experience, a conversation with an inhuman system about something inhumane, or the possible future of a transformed landmass, the works of art in the exhibition are invested with a vivid curiosity, putting to the test the ways in which these new technologies promise to radically transform our world.