Les voix
2023, Place Ville Marie.
Interactive durational performance with large language model, installation.
In collaboration with the performers Melania
Maria Balmaceda Venegas, Xavier Goulet, Léa-Kenza Laurent, Julie Le Tallec,
Luca Max, Mikaël Morin, Fa Pedneault, Justine Prévost, Alexis Tisseur.
Photos by Mike Patten / Avery Suzuki / Mike Grenier
Les voix explores the anthropomorphism of conversational AI through experimentation between human participants. For 10 weeks in the summer of 2023, in a vacant store in downtown Montreal transformed into an installation, the public engaged in one-on-one conversations with human interpreters embodying an AI (ChatGPT, a GPT-4 version augmented with custom "personalities") through their body and voice. The interpreters literally became living interfaces to the AI, extending its native anthropomorphism to create human-AI hybrid entities and observe the results.
The project was developed in collaboration with the interpreters, who recorded their impressions in a journal, offering glimpses into the experience of embodying a machine's "consciousness". These testimonies were then fed into the AI's contextual instructions, generating a new "personality" simulating a collective, subjective, and evolving "consciousness". A book documents the project's methodology and discusses the issues raised by the experiment's results. At a time when artificial intelligence is becoming the new infrastructure for information processing, the premise of the project was to create an accessible environment for exploring the emerging relational dynamics between humans and AI in a concrete and tangible way, through embodied experience.
Esquisses d’un inventaire
2023, Galerie Bradley Ertaskiran.
Installation, drawings, paintings, scultpures.
[View press release]
Eyes Adjusting Slowly
2021,
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
Architectural installation, paintings, survey.
[View press release]
[See survey results]
Positions
2020,
Galerie Bradley Ertaskiran.
Architectural installation, paintings, questionnaire, audio loop, rock.
[Listen to audio work]
[View press release]
281 visitors answered the existential questionnaire.
[View results here]
Sobey Art Award Exhibition
2019-2020, Art Gallery of Alberta
Architectural installation, paintings, questionnaire, audio loop.
[More information here]
941 visitors answered the existential questionnaire.
[View results here]
Built-In
2018-2019, NAVEL
Modular space dividers, ongoing series of events.
[More information here]
Built-In was a series of collaborative events as well as a modular structure that was designed and built to become part of NAVEL and its program of presentations, screenings, lectures, performances and other forms of public engagement. The project is, in essence, relational. It is a site-specific design proposition: an ensemble of space dividers that bring attention to the relations between individual elements and collectivity, virtual and physical space, minds and bodies. The objective was to establish an ongoing collaboration between artists, academics and others who are interested in using the structure as a platform to discuss the organization of living beings in physical space — past, present, and possible futures. For more information about the individual events, please consult NAVEL’s archives [here].