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.

“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.

Beyond the White Horizon is an attempt at embodying modernity’s illusory attempts to catalogue, classify, and rationalize the world which surrounds us.