mfc – michèle didier, Paris
Jean-Baptiste Farkas, Cari Gonzalez-Casanova
Jean Baptiste Farkas
Jean-Baptiste Farkas defines himself as a service provider. With his company IKHÉA©SERVICES, he offers artworks that are not art objects. They start with protocols and guidelines that invite us to act off-the-wall in our society.
Cari Gonzalez-Casanova
For Art-o-rama, Cari Gonzalez-Casanova will present a new project The eye you see with, inspired by her research on technologies and algorithms generated images. Its title comes from a sentence by the theologian Meister Eckhart “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me” and from the eponym book by Robert Stone.
Imitating the modus operandi of the algorithmic discipline of modelling and virtualization of the world, this purely textual project offers a visual world which only materializes inside our imagination.
Through an analogic composition of real botanical, geographical, ornithological, and ethnological data, Cari Gonzalez-Casanova describes a synthetic result, just as it was generated by the GAN algorithmic system which allows to the user to produce a synthetic image only through plain written guidelines.
Interested by the wide use of those GAN systems (Generative adversarial networks) – algorithmic architectures using two networks of neurons, opposing to each other to generate new synthetic bodies of data which can seem like real data, Cari Gonzalez-Casanova questions the more and more blurry threshold between reality and artifice. If that threshold has been widely questioned by art and literature, by philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, theology, entomology and botanic (in the context of the study on camouflage), our visual system and its part in the interpretation of the world it is looking at, has never been more put to the test than during our algorithmic era. This (erreur dans le texte en français / cet projet) project is also strongly inspired by Aurélie Jean’s book in which she speaks in a romantic way about her passion for coding, and in which she also compares (la monde) the world of algorithmic to Alice on the other side of the mirror “where all hypothesis is also hypothetic itself… between reality and virtuality… a genuine stake for civilization, because it becomes so clear that one will must accumulate knowledges not to get lost in it”.