Véronique Béland
Originally from Quebec (Canada), Véronique Béland lives in France, where she graduated from Le Fresnoy in 2012. Engaged in a reflexion on the autonomous machine as a reflexive and creative entity, her artistic practise is interested in elusive phenomena on a human scale. Through various protocols of translation or transcoding, which summon both the worlds of art and science, her works seek to make contact between the perceptible and the imperceptible, from which a certain form of narration emerges. Since 2005, her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Japan, and many countries in Europe.
En sortie, le scientifique de l'Espace: point sur la conception
This research-creation laboratory is interested in the anatomy of spacecraft. Using a corpus of textual and graphic archives dedicated to rockets, robots, probes, and other vehicles sent into space since the 1960s by the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), the goal was to use artificial intelligence and deep learning tools to design an autonomous machine capable of drawing its own plans and imagining a new genealogy of spacecraft.
Through this creation protocol that extends the spatial archive into a prospective dimension, the idea was to develop a quasi-objectivist approach by seeking to represent machinic non-humans as closely as possible to what they really are. In contrast to the affects and anthropomorphic characteristics that are often associated with them, this work sought to take a different look at these forms of life, by directly allying with one of them - the artificial neural network - to create.
The generative installation is composed of a robotic arm capable of reproducing, in real time, with a marker on paper, the diagrams designed by the neural network. Implanted in a flight case that once housed an obsolete CNES satellite, the system includes a roll of paper that automatically scrolls as soon as a drawing is completed, so that the machine is fully autonomous.