Curators: Christophe Bruno and Jeff Guess
Website: Jeff Guess
Xanadu is a curatorial project by Christophe Bruno and Jeff Guess, artists in residency at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University from September 2022 to July 2023.
The agents
Gwenola Wagon and Pierre Cassou-Noguès
2-4 March 2023
The agents (2023) is a work that questions the contemporary machine for living. In a near future, real estate ads are generated by Artificial Intelligences. Descriptions and photographs are repeated and merged in a uniform cocoon fantasy. Digital filters transform the faces of real estate agents, who take on the stereotypical appearance of animated characters. The cocoon is so soft and colorful that it turns into a nightmare.
Prompt
Alphonse Allais, Christophe Bruno, Jeff Guess, Laure Neria and Guillaume Pascale
28-30 March 2023
Let plants speak, let pure color speak, let the indeterminate speak... Faced with the recent Artificial Intelligence craze, Prompt proposes an exploration of the incompressible ambiguity between gushing words and the vegetal calm of the rhizome, between witty puns and the sublime flatness of the monochrome, between improbable invocations and a future that seems overdetermined.
During the opening I also organised and projected a 16mm screening of experimental films by Gary Beydler, Jérôme Cognet & Karen Luong, Cécile Fontaine, Takashi Ito, Maurice Lemaître and Vicky Smith
Lovelace
Cécile Babiole, Astrid de la Chapelle, Lia Giraud, Nadia Lagati, Nicolas Maigret, Benjamin Mouly and Jean-Baptiste Sauvage
1-7 June 2023
The group exhibition, Lovelace, proposes a multiscalar incursion into a world that has become a latticework of invisible connections. The artists' works delve into a series of gestures, from painstakingly manual to fully automated, such as folding, binding, weaving or entangling. While certain works indexicallly point to material origins or hidden histories, and others evoke an erotics of algebraical patterns, it becomes clear that this world is deeply intertwingled.
