Gregory Chatonsky is a French-Canadian artist. After studying art and philosophy, he founded Incident.net in 1994, the first Netart collective in France. From 2003, he tackles the question of ruins, flows and the materiality of the digital. In 2009, he began experimenting with AI, which over the years became an object of research and creation, followed by a research seminar at the ENS Paris on artificial imagination. In 2022, he published Internes, the first French-language novel co-written with an AI. He has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, MOCA in Taipei, Museum of Moving Image, Hubei Wuhan Museum, and more.
For Gregory Chatonsky, AlUla is a place where the mineral is omnipresent and puts us in front of the long work of erosion which gives shape to the Earth according to scales of time which exceed us. This patient work of terraforming is as if pursued by the work of the human being who engraves, draws, numbers, writes and digs the rocks. A continuum between nature, art and technique is invented in the desert.
Exploring the indivisibility between these processes through a language of stones, the artist mixes materiality and AI to explore the different temporalities of flows and the metamorphic power of AlUla. “Perhaps we hallucinated in the clouds, stars and stones, possible forms and a world to come where past and future, rather than opposing, would overlap.” Gregory Chatonsky finds that the fragmentary history, the incomplete traces, the broken sculptures could then be completed to resurrect what took place, as if it were the first time.