A proposition by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel and David Zerbib.
With Mélissa Biondo, Collectif Visual Contagions, Bérénice Courtin, Cindy Coutant, Alexandra Galian, Raphaëlle Kerbrat, Ettore Meschi, Celia Noverraz, Gabriel Shields Hanau, Sabrina Smaili.

A new form of "Promethean shame" - that feeling of inferiority felt by humans in the face of the perfection of their own technical productions (according to Günther Anders) - is emerging in the face of advances in generative AI: thanks to the flood of global digital image production, algorithms seem capable of creating, imagining and hallucinating beyond the all-too-human boundaries of dreams, and the all-too-poorly cerebral database of our imaginations.
But the ethereal power of computation, however great, masks the materiality of AI, which is like its artificial unconscious, its repressed incarnation. We'd like to test this clandestine dimension here, starting with its textile genealogy, and the memory of its birth in the mechanics of a loom. To this end, AIAIA Sweatshop opens up the clandestine workshop of AI, hidden behind the overly binary code of the two letters that serve as its acronym, and behind the grand narratives of a technological conquest that needs to be unraveled.
Concatenation of temporalities, hybridization of memories and identities, conversational hacking, embodied Turing tests, fingertip digital challenges, ashtray cyberpotitics, acrylic prompts...

Through all its virtual neurons, as through the pores of the skin we lend it, AI is put to work here to transpirate a material, spatial, physical reality, from which an alternative technological imaginary is woven.