Blending theory and fiction, the authors - a philosopher and an artist - explore the aesthetic and political implications of generative AI. In a fragmented time, against a backdrop of climate catastrophe, a duo of estate agents manipulate and imagine reality using the Platform, an image-generating AI.
Through a series of speculative fictions, this book explores the many facets of this revolution: how social networks, which have become filters and metafilters, are reorganising our realities; how anarchive, the chaotic accumulation of possible images, is recomposing the past, the future and the imaginary in an infinite game of distortion and reinvention; pyropictomania, or the pleasure derived from the spectacle of a formidable waste of energy; the theft of light, which is suddenly turning the history of art into darkness.
The platform hides a beast that has to be fed with electrical energy and available brain time.
Pierre Cassou-Noguès is a philosopher and writer. He is a professor in the philosophy department of the University of Paris 8 and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His work is based on a theoretical use of fiction.
Gwenola Wagon is an artist and researcher. She teaches at the Sorbonne School of Art, University of Paris 1. Through installations, films and books, she imagines alternative and paradoxical narratives for thinking about the contemporary digital world.
