VALIS

Digital Research Unit in Art and Design at the Esad Saint-Étienne/Ensba Lyon

POSTCITY, Campus

Curator: David-Olivier Lartigaud (FR)

The works presented in the context of this exhibition were created by the artists/designer-researchers (post-master level) of the Digital Research Unit in Art and Design at the Esad Saint-Étienne/Ensba Lyon. This Research Unit, which is unique in France, has the particularity of structurally bringing together two schools to explore questions of digital art and design.

Located in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, this Research Unit includes the Random(lab) of the Esad Saint-Étienne (www.randomlab.io) and the NRV lab of the Ensba Lyon (www.labo-nrv.io).

With the support of the French Ministry of Culture, the research unit currently hosts nine students and three guest researchers, who develop projects whose “raw material” is digital culture in its societal, aesthetic, political and technical sense. The Digital Research Unit can host international students and researchers.

For this first presentation in the framework of Ars Electronica, we chose to explore concepts of “science-fiction,” considered as a domain that provides forms but also imaginary elements to be renewed. The exhibition presented here is therefore a first approach which summons various references to fields such as archeology, music, robotics or video games, passing through several experiments with media (code, 3D, sound, performance, deep learning …). VALIS “Vast Living Intelligent System” is a reference to the late work of Philip K. Dick.

 

Overview of projects

Nothing wild in particular
Jeremie Nuel (FR)

Consciousness, memory, reality and identity are regular themes in Philip K. Dick’s books. These concepts have fed into AI research since the seventies. This work uses Andrej Karpathy’s neural network, known as “recurrent,” to train a computer program, using as source a text or a corpus. Once trained, the code writes, character by character, a new text. The corpus that feeds the neuronal network shortens Philip K. Dick’s work (52 books). As a mirrored entity, strange and undisciplined, the computer program tries to write, at every iteration, step by step, an often-absurd story, and sometimes, a poetic one.

 

Project Credits:

Biography:

David-Olivier Lartigaud (FR) is a professor both at the Esad Saint-Étienne and the Ensba Lyon, and is the director of their joint Digital Research Unit in Art and Design. Doctor of Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, researcher and practitioner, he dedicates most of his work to numerical questions in art and design. He organized the international symposia “Oriented Programming Art 1 & 2” at the Sorbonne in 2004 and 2007 and directed, among other things, the ART ++ book, HYX editions, 2011.