Catalogue > At random

In a dystopian future, humans have had to block out the sun in order to survive on Earth. Drought is extreme and the planet is gradually turning into a scorching desert where the survivors, installed in the basements of the great observatories, live in perpetual darkness. To compensate for the image of a sun they can no longer see, they instruct an artificial intelligence program to reconstruct it. The AI is supervised by a young woman whose mental images are particularly vivid. Drawing on the photo-novel structure of Chris Marker's film La Jetée (1962), Chronicles of the Dark Sun work on a science fiction narrative in which, as in Marker's film, an algorithm is tasked with reconstructing the past using an image from the protagonist's childhood. By recycling photographs from personal albums, advertising images and scientific snapshots, all of which are reprocessed by an AI, the film examines our relationship with technology in a disturbing and ironic way. This work is an uncanny fable that makes us think about the deformation of reality in AI as well as the unsustainability of our way of inhabiting the planet. Production with the support of Hangar Y, in partnership with l’Observatoire de Paris-PSL

Gwenola Wagon is an artist and researcher. She teaches at the Sorbonne School of Arts and the University of Paris 1. Through installations, films and books, she imagines alternative and paradoxical narratives for thinking about the contemporary digital world. With her first films, Globodrome, she surveyed the virtual globe, investigating the space of hyperinformation and Internet infrastructures in collaboration with artist Stéphane Degoutin, with whom she co-produced World Brain and the book Psychoanalysis of the International Airport. After Bienvenue à Erewhon, Virusland and Chroniques du soleil noir, post-cybernetic fables with Pierre Cassou-Noguès, she published Planète B, an essay that blends investigation and fiction in order to apprehend a rapidly expanding monster.