The imposing dimensions of the Great Hall are an opportunity for Gregory Chatonsky to consider new scenographic conditions for a major project entitled The Dream Machine. It creates an immersive environment that assimilates the Great Hall to a data center. Storage racks, cables and racks rebuild the design of this type of infrastructure dedicated to organizing, processing and storing a large amount of data. An artificial intelligence program designed by Gregory Chatonsky is learning to generate dreams from a database of 20,000 dream testimonies collected at the University of California by Adam Schneider and G. William Domhoff. These stories are then read and associated with images produced by an artificial neural network based on selected keywords. The images from these learning operations are displayed on the walls of the Great Hall, which has been transformed into a darkroom. They show forms hybridising distinct categories that produce a realism of metamorphosis: the living and the architecture, the insect and the plant, the earth and the technology...
Gregory Chatonsky was born in 1971 in Paris. He lives and works between Paris and Montreal. After studying visual arts, philosophy at the Sorbonne and multimedia at ENSBA, he developed a work around the Internet that is less considered as an instrumental technology than as a medium in its own right. He has taught at Le Fresnoy, UQAM and is currently a guest artist-researcher at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris on artificial imagination. He is preparing an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in June 2019.
Grégory Chatonsky (France) is a recipient of the Visual Arts Committees of the Cité internationale des arts.