Review of the exhibition at 104 Paris Jusqu’ici tout va bien ? (Archéologies d’un monde numérique)

After Troublemakers, Prosopopées and Les Faits du hasard, this is the fourth main exhibition imagined by Gilles Alvarez and José-Manuel Gonçalvès for the Nemo biennale a festival of new media art of Paris region.

The Idea

Visitors are invited to project in another world, a world without humanity, where the last human being has left, forgetting to turn the light off! The future archaeology of a digital world. Visitors come to discover a museum abandoned since 2019, after the disappearance of the human race…

Room after room, they will discover an exhibition of digital contemporary art and robotics in which the artworks have continued to function in complete autonomy, without their creators or their initial public. Paradoxically, this exhibition was programmed in an age when human beings did worry, quite rightly, about their possible disappearance, and their plausible replacement by machines and A.I.

From then on, what was a speculative exhibition, interrogating futures that are more or less desirable, has become an archaeological exhibition in 2019, when everything came to an end for the homo sapiens…

My thoughts

Perhaps because I visit many exhibitions featuring artists working with AI, robotics, etc I find a bit overdue the apocalypse approach, whereas it might not be necessarily the intention of the curator, we risk of ending trashing technology and everything with it. Personally, the doom and gloom scenography gets me down. So when I read the intro text I was en guard.

However, there are truly beautiful and interesting pieces. The exhibition space at 104 is particularly challenging. It’s a beautiful and huge place, full of life, but it’s difficult to create the unicity required in an exhibition.

I particularly liked two artworks also exhibited at last year’s edition of Ars electronica both caught my eye: « SEER » de Takayuki Todo and « Lasermice » de So Kanno.

“SEER” (Simulative Emotional Expression Robot) is a humanoid robotic head developed as an artistic work by Takayuki Todo. It explores the significance of gaze and facial expression in the sphere of human-machine research.

“Lasermice” is a robotic installation of 60 small robots, inspired by the synchronous behaviour of insects like fireflies. Normally a swarm network is invisible, but, here the robots create a visible network using their laser lights, As a result, they generate a pattern of rhythms that changes continually. The generated sound is made audible by a solenoid which strikes the floor. The resulting installation is a combination of the visible laser light network and rhythms.