Être Machine - Solo show of Antoine Schmitt

The exhibition "Being Machine" brings together recent and earlier works by Antoine Schmitt that explore the modes of being of living and artificial entities. For nearly 30 years, Antoine Schmitt has been questioning the processes of movement, their causes and their forms, from the cosmos to particles, from the psyche to crowds, from animals to machines. He uses programs as a malleable material to reproduce the fundamental processes of life and reality in algorithms that could be described as pre-AI, questioning the mechanisms of being more than those of intelligence. His work is characterized by a conceptual, abstract, and minimalist approach.

Artificial intelligences are taking their place in society, and the question of coexistence between them and humans arises, both economically and in terms of identity and otherness: can machines create, have empathy, desires, morality, rights, and duties? Are we, like them, in certain ways, programmed?

The exhibition brings together generative works unveiling the processual dimension of the substrate of reality or reproducing certain processes of living beings in programs, an algorithmic sculpture attempting to reproduce itself through light, post-collapse automata embodying fundamental behaviors of living beings, created in collaboration with intermedia artist Hortense Gauthier, installations that observe and analyze us, and works questioning the biases of our human perceptions. These artworks build bridges between the deep processes of being human (animal, living) and being artificial, i.e. based on electronics and algorithms. They question the programs that drive us, both human and artificial, and reveal points of mutual recognition and thus of encounter.

In these times of both identitarian closure and recomposition of our relationship to the living, the exhibition space thus becomes a space of dialogue and alliances between entities not so different, multiple and parallel, a space of transbiological encounters, an opening to otherness.