05 Sep 2025
Beyond the Hype: “The World According to AI” at Jeu de Paume, Paris
Essayby Alexander Burenkov
What does it mean to create in the age of algorithmic authorship? How do we define originality when machines remix vast archives of cultural memory at the click of a button? Who owns the rights to artworks produced through generative models trained on billions of images? And how should we reconcile the ecological cost of immense computational infrastructures with the seductive aesthetics of immateriality? These are not abstract puzzles but urgent philosophical questions at the heart of contemporary art’s encounter with artificial intelligence. It is precisely such dilemmas—oscillating between poetics and politics, innovation and exploitation—that the Jeu de Paume places under the spotlight in its ambitious exhibition "Le Monde selon l’Intelligence Artificielle" [The World According to Artificial Intelligence].
The Jeu de Paume’s latest exhibition, Le Monde selon l’IA, situates itself within an increasingly dense and crowded field of curatorial initiatives. Over the last decade, museums from Shanghai’s Ming Contemporary Art Museum (Mind the Deep, 2019) to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (Artificial Intelligence and Dialogue of Cultures, 2019), from Barbican Centre (“AI: More Than Human”, 2019–2025) and Basel’s House of Electronic Arts (Other Intelligences, 2024) to Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum (Machine Love, 2024–25), have attempted to stage the relationship between art and AI. Where earlier projects often displayed the exhilaration of discovery—sometimes reveling in the spectacle of generative neural networks as exotic curiosities and assembling spectacular but conceptually thin experiments—today’s exhibitions are increasingly marked by a critical sobriety. Curators are less interested in celebrating technological breakthroughs for their own sake and more concerned with unpacking their epistemological, political, and ecological consequences. The Jeu de Paume project embodies this shift: its curatorial strategy does not merely present a parade of AI-generated wonders, but instead organizes the exhibition around historical lineages, media-specific inquiries, and ethical dilemmas. The curators avoid both technophilia and technophobia, instead proposing a layered, historico-political perspective on how machine learning technologies are reshaping not just art, but society’s very imagination of itself. The result is a polyphonic narrative that intertwines global debates with local artistic voices, placing French contributions alongside an international constellation of artists.
The term “artificial intelligence,” coined in 1955, has grown into one of the most fraught and elastic concepts of our time—evoking both utopian dreams of limitless creativity and dystopian fears of algorithmic control. Within the realm of art, AI unsettles fundamental assumptions: What counts as originality? How is authorship defined in an age of data-trained models? And in what ways do algorithms transform our relationship not only to culture but to the natural environment itself? It is fitting, then, that the exhibition opens with works addressing ecological entanglements. The opening gambit is telling: rather than dazzling viewers with futuristic spectacle, the first gallery grounds the debate in material reality. Julien Charrière’s cinematic meditations on mineral extraction and planetary scars (lithium mines, rare earths, and data centers that inscribe themselves violently into landscapes) trace the ecological price of so-called immaterial data economies, while Agnieszka Kurant’s hybrid installations conjure AI-generated mineralogical forms and speculative taxonomies imagining “synthetic lifeforms,” as though AI itself were an evolutionary force spawning new lifeforms. Together, they dismantle the fantasy of the “cloud” as weightless, reminding visitors that every dataset has its mines, and every algorithm its carbon footprint.
From there, the exhibition splits into two currents: analytical AI and generative AI. The analytical section tackles the ways machine vision, facial recognition, and automation remake the politics of visibility and reshape human experience. Trevor Paglen dissect the “invisible architectures” of recognition systems, exposing datasets and classification tools that underpin the exercise of political power, by continuing his forensic critique of surveillance infrastructures, exposing the hidden databases that categorize faces and bodies into reductive metrics. Hito Steyerl, with her characteristic mix of irony and urgency, unveils a new video essay dissecting predictive policing and algorithmic governance, where satire cuts deep into the technocratic promises of “objective” data. Parisian collective Meta Office confronts another blind spot: the precarious labor of data moderators, “click workers” and “data clickers,” who invisibly feed the engines of AI while remaining excluded from its profits. Among those who made already audible the otherwise silenced voices of those who train and filter machine intelligence for minimal pay were numerous artists, most prominently Eva and Franco Mattes, who are surprisingly not included in the exhibition at Jeu de Paume. These works together make clear that AI is not only about intelligence but about power, labor, and inequality.
One artwork impossible to overlook—quite literally—is Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s monumental two-panel wall installation Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 (2023). Stretching an impressive 24 meters in length, the piece also exists online (calculatingempires.net ), a welcome relief given how difficult it is to take in and digest such a vast, infographic-dense work in a single viewing. The diagram is the result of four years of research and traces the genealogy of technological power over five centuries, from the Renaissance to today’s digital infrastructures. It maps the evolving mechanisms of classification, surveillance, and control, while suggesting that generative AI inherits a deep logic rooted in early modernity—in the development of linear perspective and the reproducibility of text. Widely acclaimed, the project has received numerous awards, among them the Silver Lion for promising participation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale (19th International Architecture Exhibition – Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.) and the Boghossian Art Prize in 2024.
The generative AI section—the production of novel texts, images, and sounds—shifts into a more speculative register. The Spanish collective Estampa and theorist-filmmaker Éric Bullot resurrect Saint-Pol-Roux’s utopian vision of cinema in their project Cinéma vivant (2024), where unfinished films are algorithmically animated, producing ghostly, dreamlike sequences that blur literary imagination with machinic interpretation. Gregory Chatonsky’s sprawling installation La Quatrième mémoire [The Fourth Memory] transforms autobiography into a branching system of possible selves, where AI fabricates alternative life histories that are at once intimate and estranging. Screens and sculptural assemblages present speculative “what-ifs,” situating personal memory within the logic of algorithmic recombination. Egor Kraft—working between Tokyo and Vienna—goes with his Content Aware Studies beyond the exhibition hall: the series is also spilling on the exhibition’s billboard across the façade of Jeu de Paume with recognisable fragmented classical sculptures digitally reconstructed by AI. In this series, missing fragments of classical sculptures are reconstructed through machine learning, a gesture Kraft describes as “reverse archaeology.” By restoring antiquity with algorithmic guesswork, the project provokes questions about authenticity, heritage, and the slippery boundaries between restoration and invention. The artist cautions against the uncritical use of neural networks in disciplines such as archaeology, underscoring how, in the act of reconstruction, artificial intelligence relies on rigid mathematical models. At its current stage, it lacks the capacity for irrational thought, serendipity, or imaginative leaps—qualities essential to both creative practice and genuine scientific discovery that resist assimilation into established frameworks of knowledge.
The exhibition is marked by a stern, almost didactic and historicizing approach to presentation. In deliberate contrast to the noisy spectacle of AI-generated kitsch—memes, Ghibli-style fantasies, “brainrot” imagery, and other emerging mass-culture aesthetics—it chooses a sober, critical perspective on technology. Its tone is resolutely anti-illusionistic and anti-utopian. Interspersed among the large installations are capsule displays inspired by the Wunderkammer tradition, tracing the genealogy of historical prototypes of “intelligent machines” from Enlightenment automata to twentieth-century cybernetics. These vitrines remind us that AI is not born ex nihilo in Silicon Valley; it is the latest chapter in a long human fascination with artificial cognition, control, and creativity. As we remember, the “new” is often a return of the repressed in cultural imagination. The curators wisely connect this exhibition to Jeu de Paume’s own institutional memory. Their 2020 show Supermarché des images examined the economies of image overproduction and commodification; Le Monde selon l’IA extends that inquiry into the generative regime, where images are not merely multiplied but invented wholesale. The continuity is striking: from the supermarket of images to the factory of synthetic realities.
The exhibition culminates in Jeff Guess’s poetic sound installation Mindful, installed on a sunlit balcony overlooking a sweeping panoramic vista. Here, a sequence of AI-generated voices unfolds in space, inviting the listener to conjure images that remain unseen. These ekphrastic prompts are generated in real time, offering evocative, critically charged visual descriptions that draw on contemporary developments in technology and speculative futures. Mindful is a deeply contemplative, almost solitary experience, producing the uncanny impression that the site of enunciation emanates from within the listener’s own body. The work resonates with the meditative practices favored by Silicon Valley’s tech elite; yet, unlike their introspective exercises aimed at fostering a sense of inner wholeness within the fragmented attention economy, Guess redirects attention toward a more disquieting vision. Listeners are encouraged to engage with mental images of dystopian power dynamics, reflecting on the transformative—and potentially destabilizing—role of AI in our lives. In this sense, the piece positions contemplation as a critical, imaginative act, prompting the audience to envision the societal and ethical trajectories of emerging technologies.
If the exhibition has a weakness, it lies in its occasional didacticism. At times, the capsule displays weigh down the fluidity of the artistic encounters, and some works risk redundancy in their critiques of surveillance capitalism. Yet the show's strength lies in its breadth and balance: it neither fetishizes technological magic nor succumbs to dystopian moralism. Instead, it offers a nuanced panorama, attentive to both the seductions and dangers of AI. Ultimately, The World According to Artificial Intelligence is less about predicting the future than about re-reading the present. It insists that AI is not an alien intelligence descending upon humanity but a mirror reflecting our own cultural desires, anxieties, and contradictions. The exhibition succeeds in showing that the “world according to AI” is, in fact, the world according to us—our myths, our labor, our failures, refracted back through the algorithms we have built.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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04 Sep 2025
Forces of the Unknown: Simon Denny on the Militarized Imagination and Power of Plotter Paintings
By Alexander Burenkov
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09 Sep 2025
From Screen to Surface: Reimagining Ornament in the Post-Digital Age - Interview with Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel
By Alexander Burenkov
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