AI's Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
In Progress - Interactive immersive sound installation.
This work is in progress towards an interactive installation inviting visitors to navigate fragments of a city, through spatialized sound recordings and an algorithm’s text interpretation of image footage. It is part of a research on recording places and mapping them into exhibition spaces.
The experience makes reference to French writer George Perec’s essay An Attempt at Exhausting Place in Paris. For three consecutive days in October 1974, he sat at Place Saint-Sulpice with the intent to make an inventory of its ordinary events.
For three consecutive days in October 1974, French writer George Perec sat at Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. His intent was to make an inventory of this urban square, to describe “(...) what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds”.
When entering the room, you will navigate soundscapes of the Place Saint-Sulpice, and read the descriptions of an AI, in its Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, over 3 consecutive days of December 2021. This project is part of a research on recording places and mapping them into exhibition spaces.
This project falls within a wider interest and research about building narrative tools, archives of places, making installations about physical spaces without using physical materials. It is an attempt to start feeding questions such as:
What remains of a space once it is striped out of its physicality? What technologies can be used to capture, record and deliver, in the context of an exhibition, the experience of a place?
How can we define, and design a “space” in the age of cybernetics? What do we keep from architecture when it becomes a memory?
