Alexandre Guirkinger
In conversation with the artist Fabien Giraud
REAR WINDOW
Located in the heart of Haut-Limousin, in the center-east of France, there is a hill covered in woods. This is where the physical and imaginary geographies of artist Fabien Giraud and photographer Alexandre Guirkinger intersect. This territory is not just a repository of forms and patterns, but it is also filled with stories that may or may not have happened.A small stream runs through this wetland. Ferns and surgeons thrive there, gracefully, recomposing a forest landscape characterised by a paradox: a sort of “emptiness within the scenery”. In the manner of a forest painter, Alexandre Guirkinger travelled the area as if to capture its energy, its varying dimensions and nuances at different times of the day. Using a photographic chamber, he amassed images that challenge the definitions of beauty, which go beyond the common associations of nobility with tragedy.The colonnades of fawn-bark trees are followed by clear-cutting visions – landscapes of desolation accentuated by the cold uniformity of cyanotype and palladium platinum.
To grasp the conversation that will follow, it is important to remember that these photos are the starting point for a visual thought about forest preservation, but also represent a challenge with the Feral project, initiated by Fabien Giraud. The Feral is rooted in this same area but offers a different perspective on the site. While Guirkinger sees it as the continuation of a photographic series that delves into memory through landscapes, Giraud envisions it as an extension of a work begun with Raphaël Siboni. Since their encounter at the National Studio of Contemporary Arts in Le Fresnoy, Giraud and Siboni have explored, over a long period of time and through cinematic means, the future of technologies and the evolution of humans and non-humans.
The Feral is no exception. From 2024 onwards, it will be the setting for a collective artwork on landscape scale and a training ground for an artificial intelligence responsible for creating a film shot over 1,000 years. Fueled by friendship, Alexandre Guirkinger and Fabien Giraud’s conversation sheds light on the choices that govern the implementation of this project, and further questions the act of creation in this era of “rewilding” and learning machines.
I was looking for a forest
A. G. : The forest played a part in your decision to buy this place.
F. G. : Yes, that’s accurate. I was looking for a forest. My co-workers and “I” were looking for a forest […].
A. G. : Why though? What led you to look for a forest? It could have been a different location.
F. G. : Yes, it’s true. I guess it’s just a matter of timing, because the whole of the Feral is centered around time. We may come back to this later on. Back in the day, I read a lot of Francis Hallé. In his work he tries to establish a primary forest in Europe. He mentions a thousand-year time scale and it really caught my attention. I think it takes a little less… but a thousand years is the time it takes for a primary forest to recover. It also means it takes that long for the human trace to disappear. I was told recently that no primary forest exists. And so Francis Hallé’s whole project is to restore I don’t know how many thousands of hectares, but it would be on a huge scale. The creation of an area that is ultimately inaccessible would be a European project. Initially, this relationship with time is what attracted me to the forest.
The forests of Limousin are very young. They are about 70 years old. No more. So this is a far cry from the large state-owned forests. And what is very interesting about the time scale of forests is that it is not an unimaginable time, unlike geological time. Take the example of mineral time: it exceeds all apprehension. Tree lifespans are slightly longer than ours. They can live 70 years, but others live a few centuries… Those kinds of temporalities, that exceed our own existence, are beyond our grasp. And that is why many feel a form of violence in the clean cuts. I think it is mainly a question of temporality. We know it is difficult, life is labour, an ordeal. It takes time and effort. The sudden devastation of everything is deeply felt.
A. G. : Don’t you think there is also the notion of transmission? Meaning, the forest that provides heating and furniture, which one generation will take care of, thinking of the next, and passing on the way it was understood until a few decades ago. A father who went to the forest to make wood took his son and trained him to recognise the species to collect, what to keep, and preserve for the next generation. And somehow, the clean cut, the elimination of the entire forest area, also means the shrinking of the consumption time typical of our generation, which struggles to think about the next generation.
F. G. : Yes, you are right, because that is related to the temporal dimension of the project, which has to do with how you imagine a work that is beyond your existence.
Inhumane childhood or AI
F.G. : Every year, artists are invited to take part in the Feral project. If we start in 2024 and continue until 3024, we can imagine the participation of 1000 artists. The category of existence here is wavering because the work, if we can talk about completion, will only be completed by the accumulation of 1000 lives or 999, apart from mine.
A.G. : And it is in this category of existence that… AI intervenes.
F.G. : Yes, of course. And we need something... A third person, in a way, that are neither landscapes nor humans. That’s where AI comes in. I hate the word “AI”, it is a journalistic term, but who cares. It’s a learning machine, basically. It’s nothing but a machine. Although a learning machine is a rather common expression, it could also be described as an inhuman childhood... It’s still something, it may never be someone, but it may be something in between which doesn’t exist yet. Not someone, not something. More than “something”, and not yet “someone”, we don’t know. But, basically, I started from a fairly simple observation. We humans have all become collectively the co-parents of an inhuman childhood, of something or someone that is being built, that is about to come […]. We must try to think what it means, for us, as a species, to be the parents of this child, if we want to continue with this metaphor. And this child is a very strange child, because it is a child without sex, without body, without age, it is all very strange. And so, obviously, when you are a parent of someone, or of something that is not yet someone, it also means that parenthood will transform you. We know that it is not a one-sided relationship. It is not just about dictating instructions to a child. It is the child who, in return, transforms us. This transformation, this correlation, this feedback, between being a parent and becoming, in a way, the child of our own child, this movement, is what interests me.
A.G. : There is a process of learning and unlearning on the machine side.
F.G. : I made the mistake of using the word unlearning in a text once, and it was confusing. It feels like I want to go back to wilderness, but I don’t. I believe there is something transformative and emancipatory as we go along… What world do we want to transmit to this machine, to this child? What world do we want to show it? It only acquires knowledge through our teachings. The Feral’s main objective is to invite artists to present their own world, the one they desire. Like a lesson in things for this mechanical child. That’s the goal. Just like in the eighteenth century with children’s books, picture books, except that in this case it’s on the scale of a landscape.
A.G. : When I talk about childhood, fiction, and the invention of a world, I imagine all of it taking place in the forest I’ve been to. But it also reminds me of the realm of fairy tales. I think of the way in which these original fictions, which largely took place in the forest, were also spaces of learning, transmission and symbolism.
F.G. : You’re right, even though it didn’t cross my mind. The forest in children’s stories is a great place for imagination because it is a scary place.
A.G. : They also have a very wide temporal dimension. The tale always has a very abstract timeline, a world that is close to us, and at the same time...
F.G. : Yes, it’s quite characteristic of the forest’s temporality, a time that is relatively familiar to us, that we still manage to understand, and at the same time, forests have this tremendous potential for loss. You can get lost in them. Children are fascinated by the forest’s opacity, which I believe is primarily due to its temporal opacity.
Archaeobotany at the service of “pale” lives
A.G. : It looks like you’re preparing the inaugural AI lesson.
F.G. : Yes, the epoch, what I call epoch 1, because it works in cycles, by epoch.
A.G. : This inaugural lesson in Artificial Intelligence, can you tell us exactly how it works? Well, where you are now, in any case.
F.G. : So the project is structured around time, that is to say each guest artist is in charge of an epoch. An epoch does not correspond to the epochal, historical sense. E-P-O-C-H is the term for a machine training cycle in computer simulations. So that’s really it. It’s a cycle. An artist is invited to produce a training cycle. A learning cycle. […] So an epoch doesn’t necessarily last a year, even if artists are invited every year. An epoch can be the start of a process that lasts for centuries or even just a day, if you want it to learn about the ephemeral life of a butterfly for instance. You see, it’s up to each artist to determine the duration of an epoch. […] As far as the first epoch is concerned, it’s the autobiographical dimension that interests me, even if it’s partly fictional. That’s because I would like to focus on anonymous lives, the “palest” ones, as Pierre Michon used to say, which, from the year 1000 to the present day, have been brought to me by stroke of luck. On this hill, at the foot of this hill, there. My ancestors, females in particular. So for 1,000 years, these 32 women, who followed one another... as best they could.
A.G. : So you’ve done some genealogical work?
F.G. : It’s fascinating because it’s an impossible task due to the anonymous nature of these lives. Before the nineteenth century, it was very complex. The parish had a few things going on, but as soon as we go beyond the fifteenth, there’s nothing left. People were not even given a last name. So these are anonymous people, scattered across a barren, unrewarding landscape. Short lives. I just love it. It’s fabulous. You have to do them justice. And what does justice mean? It means teaching the machine about these lives […].There are no traces of these people, but there is a science called palynology. Palynology is the study of pollen. It’s part of archaeobotany. Going back a long way is possible. In peat bog wetlands, there’s no oxygen and it protects the pollen. So we’ll do a core sampling, and from the pollen you can obviously determine the vegetation that was there, the type of agriculture. And once you know the type of agriculture, you understand what people ate, etc.
A.G. : I see. But based on that information, are you going to deduce what the staging was or are you going to supply these elements? F.G. : No, no, I’m not going to provide the scientific evidence. It is an invention based on the elements that were deduced. […] These individuals will be contributing. The figures I refer to are those humans who will come four times a year to support lives beyond their own, specifically for AI. [...] But since they are currently recorded, they can themselves be replayed.
Organic Intelligence
A.G. : We’re a long way from the notion of resilience, aren’t we?
F.G. : Resilience isn’t really my thing, in artistic terms. I have some forms of commitment, political positioning, or even a sense of activism when it comes to working with the forest and the environment […]. A few years ago, I was involved in an association whose mission is to promote a certain approach to silviculture, specifically continuous cover management. It’s a technical term that refers to alternatives to making clean cuts when they’re not required. […] My commitment to diversification, to an approach that is not closed but productive without devastation, remains intact. Except that the Feral project does not put it in its center. Because I think it’s limiting. [...] I don’t think art is the place to save the world. Ethically or ecologically speaking. It’s the place where you think about why you want to save the world. […] But the ecological dimension of the project is real, since I try to think about how an AI can be completely autonomous in terms of energy and material resources. The building is entirely solar-powered. The AI does not pump energy from the grid. It measures the amount of energy it has available for the day. So obviously it won’t be the same in February as in August. Even in terms of computing power, it will restrict itself. This is what’s so interesting, because it’s the basis of an organic intelligence. It adapts to resources.
