Better Not Tell You Now by Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion at Link Cabinet – Documentation

From March 8 to April 7, 2017 Link Cabinet presented Better Not Tell You Now, a project by Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion.

 

Better Not Tell You Now is a generative video created and presented for the first time at Link Cabinet. Using machine learning technology the artists trained an artifical intelligence with a database of forty thousand messages from Reddit, the renowned social news aggregator and discussion website. Going through subreddits like Conspiracy, Philosophy and Futurology, the artists selected messages and discussions focused mainly on Artificial Intelligence and Singularity.

 

 

Starting from this wide database the work automatically generate a recombinant text, always new and unique. The images displayed on the background are loaded in real-time, searched for keywords related to the text.
The final result looks criptic and sometimes disturbing and well reflects the absurdity of the process the artists created: to entrust an artificial intelligence with the duty to imagine, foresee and explain future possibile scenarios about the relationship between men, developments in technology and power. The project questions not only the narrations around conspiracy theories and futurology, but also the limits of artificial intelligence itself and its ability to develop original and critical thinking.

 

 

Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion born 1984 & 1982 in France, live and work in Paris. They are graduates of Higher Schools of Art of Nancy and Aix-en-Provence. Between 2007 and 2009, they integrated together various laboratories such as EnsadLab at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where they began their collaboration. Their work has been the recipient of the Arte Laguna Prize 2014 (Italy) and the Contemporary Talent Prize 2011 of the François Schneider foundation (France). It has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and festival such as: 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (Russia), OCAT Shenzhen (China), Daegu Art Museum (South Korea), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rijeka (Croatia), Loop Barcelona (Spain), Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine in Geneva (Switzerland), Palais de Tokyo (France).