Pioneers in the field of digital art and video installations, Catherine Ikam, in collaboration with Louis Fléri, has for many years been creating installations in which visitors interact with virtual characters. Inspired by the world of Philip K. Dick, these intermediary beings open doors to parallel realities, artifice and illusion: faces that disintegrate, artifacts of love, sculptures/masks derived from 3D modeling, Polaroids of urban violence, generative portraits that compose and decompose before the viewer's eyes (Artists & Robots, Grand Palais, 2018), and, more recently, dialogues by virtual actors created by artificial intelligence. Trained at the school of Peter Foldès, a specialist in computer animation, and a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Catherine Ikam has been working on the concept of identity in the electronic age since 1980. Louis Fléri's interest in new technologies dates back to the early 1980s. As a freelance journalist specializing in new images, he became an audiovisual producer in 1987, producing several videograms in the field of contemporary art. Their artistic collaboration began in 1987 with the creation of the opera Valis, commissioned for the 10ᵉ anniversary of the Centre Pompidou, where Louis Fléri was producer alongside IRCAM and the Musée National d'Art Moderne. From L'Autre (Fondation Cartier, 1992), Le Messager (Cité-Cinés, 1995, with Mac Guff Line and Medialab), Elle et la voix (IRCAM/Centre Georges Pompidou, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, 1998) to Oscar (2005, Shanghai Museum of Modern Art, Théâtre de Genève, IRCAM), Catherine Ikam and Louis Fléri have created a coherent body of work featuring virtual characters interacting with the audience or with each other (DeepKiss, 2004, Maison Européenne de la Photographie). With Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they took up the challenge of testing the virtuosity of ChatGPT-4, asking it to imagine, in the style of Racine, an encounter between two artificial intelligences in the Garden of Eden. This conversation, entirely generated and animated by the AI, addresses their destiny with unprecedented poetic and technological depth.
