It is the same with his practice and effect: “by intervening in Jamaa El Fna, Miguel Chevalier hoped to bring the history, memory and public aspect of this square – and more broadly, the Moroccan population – closer to contemporary artistic expression.”14
Chevalier thus stands at the nexus of nature and artifice, and his response is powerful.
It is powerful because, as in all his works, there is the glance backwards. As described by Jérôme Neutres, Miguel’s work can be seen as “twenty-first-century frescos that shatter the space and time of a work, fascinate us as much as they oblige us to [re]question ourselves about the mechanisms of artistic creativity and the essence of an artwork.”15
Pushed on the notion of his work standing at the nexus of nature and artifice, and how his 'artificial natures' may differ from that of the metaverse, Chevalier pointed out there is no artificial intelligence operating in the metaverse, it is all algorithms – created by programmers – to make certain effects happen. Contrastly, the artificial “nature” created by him is just that – “artificial.” What then is the difference? Miguel points out that a difference between the
“metaverse” and his “art” is that people working in the “metaverse” and other simulations scan and manipulate images, which are then placed in the simulation of our world; in his “art,” the generative self-creations actually take place in the artificial nature, which are then brought into our “real” world. This is why Chevalier does not believe his art is a simulation. He creates in software and brings it into the real world to make the artificial alive.
Chevalier puts a point on this when discussing the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and his work:
I have introduced AI in several of my works, such as in the work Herbarius 2059. I have trained the computer from thousands of texts written by the botanists who describe the plants they have discovered in different countries of the world which they have subsequently listed and classified. These botanists have elevated them to the rank of science like Tournefort, Adanson, Lamarck, Pierre Poivre, Aymonin, Léon Mercurin etc. This deep learning process allows us to generate new interesting takes on the origin of my fractal flowers which do not exist in reality.
Left
Extra-Natural 2018
Exhibition Artistes & Robots, Grand Palais, Paris (France)
Curators: Laurence Bertrand Dorléac and Jérôme Neutres
Generative and interactive virtual-reality installation
Credit: Miguel Chevalier
Film by Claude Mossessian :
https://vimeo.com/264015811
Extra-Natural 2018
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