Le Poulpe au regard de soi(e)

Antefuturist cycle

Reader, would to heaven that you could bear the icy glare of these images, begotten by a beast with neither heart nor breath. Whoever is about to cross this threshold should know this: the ground ahead is mined. The visions that rise here were born in the mute shadow of processors, shaped by insatiable algorithms.

They advance in tight ranks, a swarm of ghost fireflies. Their glare seduces. Their song is silent. But they carry neither the bite of the real nor the burn of life. They imitate beauty without having known the struggle that brings it forth.

The new Creator has neither gaze nor memory. It absorbs, computes, spits back out. From a fragment of text it begets countless images, all different, all alike. Icons without venom, visions without wound.

So they must be torn from that cold proliferation. Brought back toward matter, weight, error. Given over to light, to salt, to paper, so that something may still resist.

For without resistance there is no image. Only apparitions.

Begun in the early days of consumer generative artificial intelligence, Le Poulpe au regard de soi(e) questions the place of the creative gesture before the machine-made image. The work unfolds in six cantos, each exploring photographic techniques and material transformations drawn from fragments of the Comte de Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror. The generated images become the negatives of cyanotypes, a process whose invention coincides with the birth of Isidore Ducasse, before being put through various treatments that reinforce their material uniqueness.