Rouvrir le monde with Pauline Rousseau

Trained at the École du Louvre and the ENSP, Pauline Rousseau (b. 1989, lives and works in Paris) is a multimedia artist whose work explores issues related to gender, identity, and intimacy with humor and depth. A winner of the PSG Carte Blanche and nominated for the BNF Bourse du Talent, Pauline Rousseau has presented her work at, among other venues, the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie (Arles), Galerie Agnès b and Palais de Tokyo (Paris). She published́ two books with éditions Dilecta in 2018.

Host structure: Les Jardins d’Épione, inclusive housing in Mougins
The project: how do you paint a portrait of a place and its inhabitants? By exploring different forms of photography! Plastic photography through collage and reuse, old and natural processes such as the anthotype, and then, once the ice is broken: the portrait.
During this residency, Pauline Rousseau pursues a personal project on the construction and deconstruction of her fantasies. She is capitalizing on sleepless nights and nightmares by generating images for the first time via artificial intelligence (AI). She writes prompts-key words that seem innocuous to her- to direct the AI toward creating images: old photograph, men in suits, children, dessert, boxing, etc. The words seemingly have no particular connection to her nightmares. However, to her astonishment, the resulting images turn out to be very disturbing. She observes her fears taking shape and becoming images.
If psychoanalysis involves putting words to the images of our unconscious, prompting would be version 2.0 of this process. The words entered at a given moment, even without a conscious choice, would enable the machine to probe our unconscious, understand us better than we do ourselves and generate the appropriate images.
Pauline Rousseau posits the hypothesis that a psychoanalytical dialogue could unfold between her and the AI.

Rouvrir le monde – Un été culturel, a DRAC PACA initiative.