Second Earth

Generated from millions of data – images, texts and sounds – found on the Internet, Terre Seconde by Gregory Chatonsky, an artist captivated by the imaginary fields opened by digital technology, takes the form of an evolving installation. Second Earth is another Earth, a replacement planet, a ship drifting in the silence of space, the hallucination of a senseless machine, a monument dedicated to the memory of the extinct human species. Another world created by a recursive network of neurons, usually called “artificial intelligence”. Initiated more than a year ago following experiments with deep learning software, Gregory Chatonsky’s project was inspired by the observation that “the machine was becoming capable of automatically producing a phenomenal quantity of realistic images from the accumulation of data on the Web. This realism is similar to the world we know, but it is not an identical reproduction. Species metamorphose into each other, stones mutate into plants and the shores of the ocean into unseen organisms. The result: this “second” Earth, a reinvention of our world, produced by a machine that wonders about the nature of its production. From a database of millions of images, she creates her own representation of the mineral planet. Gregory Chatonsky, by the same process of data accumulation and statistical analysis, then gives him the fluids, plants, sound, speech and organisms to populate his surface. A world to “visit” in an exhibition that the artist has designed to be progressive: a modular structure welcomes new sculptures with strange organic shapes imagined by the machine every day. Dream in a dream, space in space: for Gregory Chatonsky, the installation must “make sensitive the ambiguity of this artificial imagination which radically doubts its status.