Le jardin des mutations

2025-2026
Algorithmic video installation, computer, real-time meteorological data, image archives.

The rise of AI-generated imagery fosters a fear among artists—the fear of seeing their work absorbed and dissolved into large-scale generative models. Le Jardin des mutations (The Garden of Mutations) stems from this concern: in it, I entrust my entire archive—from exhibited works to never-before-seen images—to an image model.

Centering on these layers of memory, the work weaves together the ancient art of divination and artificial intelligence to conjure a parallel world—a mirror of a tangible garden. This dialogue between oracles and computation is rooted in history: in 1701, the philosopher and mathematician Leibniz discovered in the I Ching—a millennia-old Chinese oracular text—a binary system composed of 64 combinations of solid and broken lines. From this convergence of ancestral wisdom and mathematical thought, modern binary code was born, forming the foundation of all contemporary computing.

Inspired by this uncanny lineage, Le Jardin des mutations transforms meteorological data (temperature, humidity, wind) into virtual “rolls of the dice,” constantly generating new metamorphoses. Like nested worlds, the virtual garden evolves in direct echo of the tangible world. Environmental climate shifts cause a digital landscape to appear, mutate, or malfunction in a state of constant reconfiguration. The known world thus drifts slowly toward phantasmagoric territories—a porous space where the boundaries between material reality and the realms of the mind dissolve.

The installation rests on a central paradox: no complete archive will exist of a work that is itself built upon an accumulation of archives. The landscapes are visible for only a few seconds to those present, then vanish without being saved. By refusing capture, the work invites us to contemplate a shifting “elsewhere” and poses a simple question: what if the memory of images now resides less in what we store than in what passes by?