Sculpture (Sculpture)

Raphaël Zarka discovered the scientific manuscripts of Abraham Sharp while in Oxford. Sharp was an English 18th century astronomer whose treatise Geometry Improved became the subject of a new body of photographs and sculptures. In this document, Sharp draws infinite possible combinations that enable the making of a polyhedron from a wooden cube – the most complex figure allows a perfect form with 120 facets.

Photography (Photography)

This photograph seems to be awaiting meaning, it more or less evokes known elements without really identifying with them completely: a motorway interchange, a bridge, an electric pylon… In fact this is the end of the tracks of the Aérotrain, a wheelless monorail invented by Jean Bertin in the 1970s, which acts like ‘a fossil of movement on landscape scale’, as explained by the artist. This fragmentary place is meant to activate physical movement. It also activates the spectator’s imagination.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

– In which a storm breaks out in a computing division and its simulation is turned inside out – Fourth episode of The Unmanned series, “The Uncomputable” is the story of a failure: the building in the northern plains of Scotland of a giant climate prediction factory by meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. This enormous inverted terrestrial globe supposed to host 64,000 women-computers and able to forecast the world weather was never built. Partly shot in a wind tunnel (used for aerodynamics simulation), this episode shows the impossible attempt at building the factory and the collapse of its hypothesis of a global computation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

– In whiche a lemyng starre returneth in the yeer foretolde and alle thing that spak to us turneth ayeyn to silence – Sixth episode of The Unmanned and sharing the same camera movements as the episode “1997 – The Brute Force”, “Mil troi cens quarante huyt” refers to the appearance of a comet in 1759 – thus validating the computation and rational prediction of its return by the British astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley. The action of the film goes back four centuries earlier, in 1348, and unfolds around one unique scene: the escape and the death of a bishop and his court in a forest during the first major outbreak of the Black Plague which was said at the time to be born in the hair of comets.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

– In which he changes the rules of the game and all imitations are suddenly interrupted – Third episode of The Unmanned series and replicating the editing structure of “1834 – La Mémoire de Masse”, “The Outlawed” takes place in August 1953 on the island of Corfu, in Greece, at the Club Méditerranée resort where Alan Turing spent his last summer. On a sunny afternoon, the mathematician and inventor of the modern computer, subjected to hormonal treatment after being convicted for his homosexuality, embarks on a makeshift raft to study the morphogenesis of marine organisms. As he explores the coast, the raft progressively drifts away.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

– In which an intelligence going back to its place of origin discovers the agony of gods on which it thrives – Seventh and last episode of The Unmanned , “a flood” is set in 1542 as the first conquistadors enter the land later to be known as the Silicon Valley. Mining the colonial past of the region, and entirely generated and edited with an autonomous artificial intelligence system, this film for and by machines only features the return of an intelligence to its place of origin and the death of the animal gods who used to live in it. Closing the series onto itself with a machine trained solely on its first episode (“2045 – The Death of Ray Kurzweil”), it shows the wandering of an inhuman vision trying to revive meaning by recognizing itself on the god’s corpses.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

– Thisstoryoffriedrichkurzweiliwanttotellit- myselfhowhelivedinthisroomandh – Inspired by the writings of the feral child Kaspar Hauser and told by the young Friedrich, both father and son of Ray Kurzweil, this story unfolds on the microscope images of a blade cutting through metal. Filmed at the scale of a fold of matter, this cut is the axiom on which the first season of The Unmanned rests.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Unmanned, is composed of several 26min episodes, it is a fictional documentary about the history of humanity faced with technology acceleration. Each episode dramatizes a “singular” encounter between man and machine. Each episode is filmed with a different camera (a preprogrammed machine or a drone).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

-In which predicting its past it lives working and dies fighting- Fifth episode of The Unmanned , “La Mémoire de Masse” unfolds during the second Canuts revolts in Lyon in 1834. These riots now known as the ‘bloody week’ came as a reaction to the automation of work in the silk industry by the Jacquard Loom and its implementation of the punched card – first historical ‘mass storage’ system allowing the inscription and replication of complex weaving patterns. This inaugurating event in the history of workers emancipation movements of the 19th century is actually the first revolt against modern computation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

– In which defeated he leaves the scene and the stage is left in search of its scale – Second episode of The Unmanned series, “The Brute Force” reconstructs the minutes following Garry Kasparov’s defeat against the IBM Deep Blue computer on 11 May 1997. A camera with computer-programmed movements scrutinises the elements of an empty setting after the chess champion has left the scene, thus abandoning it to the disproportion of a world without its own scale.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Letters of the Greek alphabet glisten on a black background. When a letter appears, there is a sound. Each letter corresponds to a star in the sky.