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“Giant Inscrutable Matrices” is the term coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky to qualify the machines that embody Artificial Intelligence.

Giant – the massive servers used to host the petabytes of data needed to create AI.
Inscrutable – AI as opaque systems, that no one, including its creators, is really able to understand the ways it functions, and has even less control over it.
Matrices – the orthogonal, vertical and horizontal limitless rhizome of endless floating-point numbers that gives birth to AI.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is, among the specialists dealing with AI, one of its most potent critics, as he believes that AI will simply wipe out the human race, as soon as it becomes sufficiently intelligent. It is not a question of “if”, but a question of “when”.
The debate about the balance between the benefits and threats caused by AI is, obviously, raging. While AI is discussed in nearly any possible manner, and the quasi-miraculous operations it is able to perform, practically no-one has wondered about the way Artificial Intelligence may look like.

It is this question that Nicolas Grospierre is asking in Giant Inscrutable Matrices, precisely by using Eliezer Yudokowsky words to describe AI, whose strange poetry and evocative para-scientific terminology accurately but also metaphorically opens up our imagination to AI.
To tackle this visual riddle Nicolas Grospierre devised a double strategy.
On the one hand, he created works based on his huge collection of vintage negatives from the 1960’s, and among which he found beautiful photos of electronic boards – in a way the ancestors to AI. These splendid images, showing the intricacy and sharp abstraction of electronic boards, are used either per se, as simple yet potentially representations of the beginning of AI, or in an intricate photographic object. This work, making use of mirrors and miniature light-boxes, presents AI as a kind of abysmal yet quasi living organism, made out of electronic boards endlessly sprawling.
On the other hand, Nicolas Grospierre, has reached for help from Artificial Intelligence systems themselves. Working with the AI image generator Midjourney, he asked it to create images based on the prompt “Giant Inscrutable Matrices”. Many different iterations and avatars were produced, until the machine spat an image so striking that it stood out as the right answer. It represented huge orthogonal monoliths made out of mirrors in a Northern, barren yet beautiful landscape [Giant Inscrutable Matrices #1]. The most uncanny thing about this image is its total lack of humans. It shows the world of AI after it has annihilated humanity. It is the world post-human civilisation. And it resembles Nicolas Grospierre’s sculpture in a strange fashion.

Ultimately, Giant Inscrutable Matrices deals with the awe, wonder but also existential fright AI stirs in all of us.