PETITE MORT
2023

Text by Suzie Crespin Thirode

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“Petite Mort” is a three-screen video installation inspired by the new AI-powered Love Dolls. Questioning the boundary between the human and the non-human, these dolls, bearing childlike, naïve faces, are designed for their owners to project their sexual fantasies onto them. Created from photographs and then animated with AI software, these half-living, half-artificial beings whose presence evokes a sense of uncanny strangeness, recite, in alternation, poems written by the artist and writer Suzie Crespin Thirode. Spoken by these transformed women, the poems overturn the impression of emptiness inherent to Love Dolls, reclaiming power over their submission. The installation runs in a loop: the three characters repeat the same phrases endlessly, heightening their robotic aspect. Another form of artificiality also emerges in the deformation of their faces, as the AI software spontaneously generates teeth that dislocate and distort their features. This project explores new forms of image manipulation enabled by artificial intelligence, as well as the subversion of artificiality by pushing to the extreme the synthetic effect of bodies and their voices. Here, artifice reaches its paroxysm. By seeking to blur the boundaries between incarnation and simulation, from photographs that were originally real, the videos unsettle our perception of what constitutes the human.

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