Béatrice Lartigue is a French visual artist based in Toulouse. She is co-founder of the interdisciplinary collective Lab212. Using new media, Béatrice creates installations which explore our perceptions of space and sound. These pieces, in which the visitor becomes an actor, provoke a loss of bearings and offer a sensitive interpretation of impalpable phenomena by giving them a materiality. We spoke with Béatrice about her practice and working with technology.
1. How would you describe your artistic practice?
I have worked as an artist since 2008, when I co-founded the interdisciplinary collective Lab212 with a group of friends. I develop projects at the intersection of art, science and technology. My practice explores the materialisation of invisible physical events, by immersing visitors in a space whose rules are partly written and partly in the making. A critical perspective on the utilisation of technology in a fragile environmental context guides my practice.
2. How are you using AI to explore our relationship with our environment in 'The Big Smoke’?
Ever since I started working with new technologies, I've been exploring their impact on our everyday environment (our habits, our perceptions of our bodies, the space around us etc.,) Through the ‘The Big Smoke’ project, I was interested both in further exploring the tools inherent in machine learning, and their impact on the way we perceive our environment - namely architecture, town planning, historical monuments.... For example, the democratisation of photography, and in particular the fact that we now take pictures with our mobile phones and share them on dedicated platforms (Flickr, etc.), has highlighted the fact that iconic monuments are photographed from similar points of view by a wide variety of people. The result is both a stereotyped and magnified vision of a building, and a fragmented one - that is incomplete by essence. It was therefore interesting to explore how generative AI algorithms do or do not amplify these trends, as they are in turn fed by millions of data.
3. What interests you most about working with new technologies and science in your practice?
My aim is to use technology to deconstruct the mechanisms at work and make them accessible to the general public. As a new media artist, I feel it's essential to explore and understand the issues at play: social, political and cultural, as well as economic and environmental. Some technologies are evolving at an incredible pace (web, NFTs, AI, etc.), while others, more closely related to the ‘physical’ world, are evolving at a much slower pace (electronics etc.). I also find it interesting to compare these temporalities, because the human temporality, although in constant search of speed and efficiency, remains that of a human being and not that of a computer.
4. Why do you think art allows a unique way to innovate with new technology?
Art is sometimes a naïve way of exploring fields that we don't always fully master or understand. Through the installations that I generally work on in duo with Nicolas Guichard from Lab212, the mantra ‘learning by doing’ remains quite relevant. I like to explore empty spaces in my work because they appeal to the intelligence and imagination of visitors, who create their own connections and tell their own stories.
5. Looking forward what do you think are the biggest opportunities for artists working with AI and data sets?
I don't think I can answer that question, but what motivates me is to pursue this exploration through collaborations between artists from different fields, as well as researchers and scientists. I think it's essential that both the general public and the political world take account of the ethical and power issues at work in the exponential development of AI-related technologies.
