Reopening the world with Pauline Rousseau

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

Hosting organization: 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 makes the most of sleepless nights and nightmares, generating images for the first time using artificial intelligence (AI). She writes prompts, key words that seem innocuous to her, to direct the AI to create images: old photography, men in suits, children, dessert, boxing, and so on. The words seem to have no particular connection with his nightmares. But, 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 put into words at a given moment, without even 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 hypothesizes that a psychoanalytical dialogue could unfold between her and the AI.

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