Xanadu presents:
Prompt
with Alphonse Allais, Christophe Bruno, Jeff Guess, Laure Neria & Guillaume Pascale
Iméra, 2 place Leverrier, 13004 Marseille
Tues 28 March 2023 ::: Opening 6pm – 8pm, Performances and projection of experimental films at 18:30pm
Wed 29 March 2023 ::: 10am – 6pm
Thurs 30 March 2023 ::: 10am – 6pm
Let plants speak, let pure color speak, let the indeterminate speak… Faced with the recent Artificial Intelligence craze, Prompt proposes an exploration of the incompressible ambiguity between gushing words and the vegetal calm of the rhizome, between witty puns and the sublime flatness of the monochrome, between improbable invocations and a future that seems overdetermined.
Album Primo-Avrilesque (Alphonse Allais, 1897)
Facsimile of the first edition of the Primo-Avrilesque Album, a radical work with multiple ramifications in 20th century art, in which the “Incoherent Artist” appears as a precursor of the idea of monochrome in painting. Facsimile published by Les plis du ciel.
A.A. vs. A.A. (Christophe Bruno, 2023)
This mise en abyme of the question of the monochrome in the era of the “prompt”, of ChatGPT or Dall-e, borrows the form of Alphonse Allais’ Album Primo-Avrilesque to bring a firm and definitive answer to the question: should artists fear Artificial Intelligence?
To be determined (Jeff Guess, 2023)
On the one hand, the expression “to be determined” qualifies a future event which will indeed take place, but which lacks precision, details still remain unknown, their exact form a mystery. But on the other hand, it evokes a state of mind, a hyper-focalisation on a well-identified but uncertain goal, mined by obstacles and hindrances, an obsessive stubbornness to achieve one’s goals, in spite of it all. This conference-performance is situated in the middle of these troubled waters.
Le parloir des plantes (Laure Neria & Guillaume Pascale, 2023)
Flirting with the documentary dimension of botany, Le parloir des plantes is research that associates the literary with a programmed drift. The experience combines poetry, speculative fiction and performative gestures. Three texts enter in dialogue together searching for new narrative paths or planting the seeds of their outlines.
* During the opening March 28th, Jeff Guess proposes, as part of his invitation by Les milieux associés, a 16mm screening of experimental films by Gary Beydler, Jérôme Cognet & Karen Luong, Cécile Fontaine, Takashi Ito, Maurice Lemaître and Vicky Smith
Alphonse Allais (1854-1905) was a French journalist, writer and humorist of the Belle Époque, famous for his acerbic pen and absurdist humor. His monochrome, Des souteneurs, encore dans la force de l’âge et le ventre dans l’herbe, boivent de l’absinthe, discovered in 2018 among a previously unpublished set of seventeen works from the Arts Incohérents, was classified as a National Treasure in 2021 by decision of the Ministry of Culture.
Christophe Bruno develops a polymorphic artistic work – Internet works, hacks, installations, performances, drawing, sculpture, Artificial Intelligence – that takes a critical look at network phenomena and globalization in the field of language and images.
Jeff Guess is an artist, curator, researcher and professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Paris-Cergy. His work is primarily an artistic and archaeological investigation into the technical image and its multifarious entanglements with voice and language. His more recent projects expand upon these considerations, exploring the relationships between bodies, communication and computation in disciplines as diverse as spirit phenomena, animal language projects and competitive sports.
Laure Neria is a writer and sound director. She publishes poems, short stories and art criticism notably in the magazine Esse. Her ecopoetic practice led her to create the Ecological Transition Narrative for the City of Montreal in 2020. She has also participated in numerous writing residencies and her sound work has won awards and been broadcast and in France and Canada. The magazine Débuts published her first novel in the winter of 2022.
Guillaume Pascale is an artist working within the new media scene. He sees himself as a programmer of audiovisual and software dérives. His work searches new perspectives on the environment, navigating between the sky and the Earth, between 0 and 1. From this liminal point of view emerges an imaginary embodied in multimedia installations or unstable sound performances: audiovisual landscapes, operative images, data architectures, and musical environments which participate in the elaboration of speculative fictions traversed by documentary elements.
The performance, To Be Determined, by Jeff Guess is the fourth event of the the seminar Les milieux associés, organized by the Beaux-Arts de Marseille – INSEAMM
Laure Neria and Guillaume Pascale benefitted from a grant from La Marelle for their installation and performance, coupled with a 6-week residency period in February and March 2023 in Marseille (in partnership with Alphabetville). La Marelle organizes creative residencies in Marseille, La Ciotat and in the South of France. It accompanies projects, supports and publishes innovative forms of literary creation, proposes cultural actions to the public and professionals, and strives to promote the art of writing and its necessity.
The facsimile of Alphonse Allais’ Album Primo-Avrilesque was published by Les plis du ciel
More info on: http://www.xanadu.institute
Facebook event : https://www.facebook.com/events/1892881774423856
Xanadu is a curatorial project by Christophe Bruno and Jeff Guess, artists in residency at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University from September 2022 to July 2023.
Xanadu is located next to the Parc Longchamp, in the heart of the gardens of the Institute.
Christophe Bruno 
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