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catoptric chests

Aleph

By All Works, catoptric chests, mirrors

Aleph is a work whose direct reference may be the short story of the same title by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, the Argentinian author describes the Aleph as “the point in space that contains all other points”.

At the same time, Nicolas Grospierre’s Aleph has a second, less evident source of inspiration, and which lies in the tessellated structure which develops upon the viewer’s eyes as he gazes into the work. This structure reminds indeed of the so-called “space-frame”. In architectural engineering, a space frame is a rigid, light-weight, truss-like structure constructed from interlocking struts in a geometric pattern. It is capable of bearing huge weights in comparison to its relatively light structure.

The space-frame technology was developed, among others, by Buckminster Fuller, or, later by the avant-garde architectural groups Archizoom or Archigram. These architectural groups saw the space-frame as a way to emancipate architecture from geography and place. Because it was lightweight and easily assembled, the space-frame was seen as the basis of a nomadic architecture, but also progressive, egalitarian and non-hierarchical.

However, these utopian ideals proved, in the long run, quite illusory. The space frame, as an engineering technology, was used primarily in the design of malls, airports, commercial warehouses – in a word, in the architecture of social control of late capitalism. In effect, instead of being the instrument of architectural emancipation, the space frame produced the contrary – the architecture of invisible oppression and control.

Nicolas Grospierre’s Aleph is, by itself, quite contradictory, as it seems to contain a limitless space in a limited box, but it also reminds of this paradoxical and contradictory phenomenon that the space frame is.

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Giant Inscrutable Matrices

By All Works, catoptric chests, mirrors

“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.

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The Library

By All Works, catoptric chests, collections, mise-en-abyme

The Library project is not the representation of a specific library, but rather an attempt at representing the very essence of the idea of a library. It is loosely inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ novel The Library of Babel, where the author describes the universe as an “infinite and cyclic” library. The project is thus an attempt at showing, through a photographic installation, the library as an infinite gathering of books, but that can be contained in a single book.

If one assumes that a library has three main functions, that is to gather books, to stock them and archive them, and to make them available to the public, it is possible to phrase the following statements. First, as a library is, by nature, a place where books are gathered, it is potentially infinite, because books, and thus knowledge, knows no boundaries and is constantly expanding. And second, a library may contain a book on libraries, or even the list of all books in that particular library, which means that a library is simultaneously the container and the content of the same subject matter

The Library is a photographic installation developed upon the above-mentioned propositions. In its simplest form, the installation is composed of six elements (photographic objects and installations) laid down in a circle. These elements are the following:

A fake book, i.e. a photographic object imitating one of the books of the library, life size;
A fake bookshelf, i.e. a photograph imitating one of the bookshelves of the library, life size;
The Never-Ending Wall of Books, i.e. a photograph of a bookshelf placed in a light box and shown in mirrors, in order to create the illusion of a wall spreading endlessly in all directions;
The Never-Ending Corridor of Books, i.e. two photographs of bookshelves placed in light boxes and shown in mirrors, in order to create the illusion of a corridor sprawling endlessly;
The library building i.e. a light box representing a miniature library;
A real book, which is the alter ego of the fake book, where one can find a photograph of the miniature library building.

In this setting, watching the installation is like a backward tracking, starting from a book, where each additional step backward places the viewer in a higher position, and ending where it has started.

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The Bank

By All Works, catoptric chests, conceptual photography, photomontage

The Bank is a photographic installation which plays with the idea of the financial institution, where the bank stands as a metaphor of wealth, and more generally, all material things.

The Bank’s key driving ideas are the following : on the one hand, that one is always drawn to what is hidden and concealed, and that one always wants to discover what is behind closed doors. And on the other hand, that apperances may be deceiving.

Practically, the installation consists of series of photographs and of photographic objects which are designed to tickle the viewer’s curiosity and try to discover what is hidden behind the innumerable doors of the Bank.

Formally, the Bank is organised on three sets of elements. First, the viewer is confronted with photographs of deserted and disused New York banks interiors. Second, the viewer enters the vault, which is made out of 10 life size photographs of safe deposit boxes. There are approximately 2000 safe desposit boxes represented in this vault, each one with a number. The numbering of the safe deposit boxes hide a secret message, invisible at first sight, that the viewer is invited to decipher. Third, and finally,the viewer is confronted with the Safe, at the core of the installation. It is a photographic object representing a life size bank safe, whose doors may be openened.

Metaphorically, the Bank is an attempt at tackling the finiteness and illusory character of all material things. Once all doors have been opened, the viewer may well realise that there really is nothing to be found.

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