ALREADYMADES (2024)

SCULPTURE

"Sculpture of a chromed Mercedes-Benz wheelbarrow filled with breeze blocks on a pedestal"

This instruction was given to an artificial intelligence image generator, producing an image that serves as a model for the production of this sculpture. The intention to integrate AI into the Duchampian creative process aims to redefine the conditions of creation and pay homage to his series of ready-mades.

This sculpture project represents an extension of my practice and its current theoretical issues. Encouraging the creation of a new work, combined with the experience of artificial intelligence, disrupts/questions the stakes of contemporary creation in line with the ready-made. The choice of the artist as a succession of sensitive gestures operates as a tribute to Duchamp. It is through the combination of the logic of artistic production presented in Marcel Duchamp's Creative Process and the analysis of his multifaceted work, coupled with the use of new tools such as artificial intelligence, that I envision this new project.

The Duchampian legacy and its influence on my artistic practice operate at different levels, whether through the choice of rather trivial subjects and his ability to transcend them into poetic realms (for example, Chocolate Grinder No. 2, which I interpret as a new type of structuralist nude), or through his aesthetic proposition of the "beauty of indifference," which has become a new dogma that has greatly influenced various approaches in contemporary art, particularly the strategies that allowed him to insert his ready-mades into the art field (the choice of object, the gesture of overturning, the signature, the elevation of the object by a peer artist – the photograph by Alfred Stieglitz published in The Blind Man magazine).

Therefore, the process will begin by producing a simple instruction that summarizes the visual aspect of the work in order to activate artificial intelligence: "Sculpture of a chrome Mercedes-Benz wheelbarrow filled with breeze blocks on a pedestal." The AI-generated rendering already merits specific attention. It is the sum of myriad collected sources of information that reflect the understanding of the definition of art and its aesthetic characteristics. Thus, it will be necessary to engage in a dialogue with science and computer programming to precisely understand the stakes of this technology and its specific applications because through this simple initial digital draft, the transposition of this visual already generates a series of choices regarding the use of materials (here, the playing field expands. The pedestal, the wheelbarrow, and its potential modifications, the addition of a Mercedes-Benz logo, the production of faithful breeze blocks to the artificially generated image) meant to accurately restore the visual aspect of the draft but also raises ethical questions about the use of this approach."