They were lying to you, everything is different!
Preview: 26 May 2018, 5:30 – 8pm
Visit: Centre Pompidou, Paris
Using an application with a smartphone, Recycle Group’s project, They were lying to you, everything is different, explores the relationship between artificial intelligence and tangible reality, in the context of the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection.
Downloadable on App Store or Google Play, the application’s project allows viewers to confront 18 existing art works, from the museum’s collection, with Recycle Group’s augmented art. The selection of works was chosen by digital technology on the basis of their readability and exposure. It reveals a growing conflict between physical and informational reality and questions the cultural, social and political value of museum art. What will remain of the museum’s collection if it is analysed and processed by artificial intelligence? How will the role of museums change, if art works are reduced to data? And how will viewers appreciate art works, if their analysis is based on algorithms?
While analysing the conceptual art work One And Three Chairs (1965) by Joseph Kosuth, comprised of a chair, a photograph of the chair, and a dictionary definition of the word « chair », the system detects only the physical one and suggests how to improve the work, by adding a couple of chairs. Confused, the viewer is faced with what looks like three chairs and wonders if the real one exists or if it was designed with a code.
George Baselitz’s painting Bildübereins (1991) represents recumbents and was expressively painted (with brushes and finger strokes) on top of another one, also by Baselitz. In this case, the painting is overlaid by Recycle Group’s application, with an analytical report on the number of views over 24 hours, suggesting a new age for funeral representation.
In the photographic series 24 heures de la vie d’une femme ordinaire (1974), Michel Journiac dresses up as a woman and enacts the so-called conventional movements and appearances of a woman, in her everyday bourgeois life. Recycle group pushes this critique a step further: their system’s intelligence identifies Journiac’s poses as those used by online clothing shops for women, implying that the appearance and body language women are still manipulated and stereotyped.
Thus, with an ironic and visionary analysis, Recycle Group points to a world where cognitive processes are guided by subjective artificial intelligence. Tampering with existing works, which loose their materiality and symbolic value, the project They were lying to you, everything is different also supports a new form of institutional critique and questions the role of museums.
An entrance ticket is needed to enter the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou.
RECYCLE GROUP application
Available on App Store and Google Play on May 21, 2018
Using the application:
- Download the Recycle Group application on your smartphone
- Launch the application
- Allow access to your camera
- Use the “info” tab to locate the works on the map of the Centre Pompidou
- With the application, use your camera on located works
