PARIS.- From 11 April to 21 September 2025, Jeu de Paume is presenting a major exhibition exploring the links between artificial intelligence (AI) and art, the first of its size and scope in the world.
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AI algorithms and models, which are developing at an accelerating pace in all areas of society, today arouse astonishment, fear, enthusiasm and scepticism.
The World Through AI presents a selection of works by artists who, over the past ten years, have been critically engaging with AI in the fields of art, photography, cinema, sculpture, literature and music. The exhibition features creations – many of them specifically produced for this occasion – by French and international artists such as Julian Charrière, Grégory Chatonsky, Agnieszka Kurant, Christian Marclay, Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Sasha Stiles.
From so-called “analytical AI”, which analyses and organises vast quantities of data, to “generative AI”, capable of producing data (images, texts, sounds) after having been trained with vast quantities of other data, the exhibition looks at how these technologies are profoundly transforming creative processes while questioning their multiple social, political and environmental implications.
A series of “time capsules” punctuate the exhibition, in the form of vitrines suggesting historical and genealogical links between these contemporary phenomena and a selection of images, artworks and devices stemming from the past. Beyond any technophile fascination or technophobic rejection, Jeu de Paume’s exhibition offers a reflection on how AI is transforming our visual and sensory relationship with the world, as well as our societies.
“Artificial intelligence”, a concept first introduced in 1955, refers today to a series of machine learning technologies that are transforming all areas of society, with wide ranging applications that include the analysis and classification of vast quantities of data, automated decision-making, as well as the generation and transformation of textual and visual contents. These technologies raise all sorts of ethical, economic, political and social issues, for example with regard two privacy protection and racial or gender discrimination, while transforming our relationship with images and texts. In the field of art, AI is currently redefining the processes of production, circulation and reception, challenging traditional notions of creativity, originality and copyright. The artists in the exhibition work with these technologies in order to question their consequences for art and society, and also to experiment with possible new forms of expression.
Thematically, the exhibition opens on the material and environmental dimensions of AI, too often overlooked. Julian Charrière’s works, such as Buried Sunshines Burn, raise the question of the material resources required by digital industries and their environmental impact, while the sculptures of the series Metamorphism highlight the material dimension of digital technologies, too often presented as “dematerialised” when in fact they depend on the extraction of non-renewable natural resources. The giant diagrams Anatomy of an AI System and Calculating Empires, both by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, tackle the challenge of how to map AI in both time and space. Calculating Empires, in particular, traces five centuries of technical, scientific and cultural inventions and experiments that have given rise to the current forms of AI.
The exhibition continues with the theme of analytical AI, tackling machine vision and facial recognition, focused on the detection, recognition and classification of objects, faces and emotion represented in images. Various artists question the effects of these processes on our perception of the world, together with their economic, political and social consequences. Among the key works in this section, Trevor Paglen’s Faces of ImageNet visualise how facial recognition systems learn to identify faces through simplified verbal categories, denying the complexity and diversity of the real world. A new installation by Hito Steyerl, presented for the first time in this exhibition, examines how AI systems transform visual perception into tools for control and surveillance.
The exhibition also takes a critical look at the human exploitation that AI requires. Agnieszka Kurant and Meta Office highlight the invisible micro- labour of so-called “click workers” – underpaid people who perform online tasks on the internet invisibly – via collective portraits or documentation of their labour conditions. These works reveal the gap between an ideology of dematerialisation – fostered by metaphors such as the one of the “cloud” – and the actual conditions that are required in order to keep AI models functioning.
The second major chapter of the exhibition concerns generative AI, which explores the ability of AI models to generate new data (texts, images, sounds) from vast quantities of data found on the internet and used for training. This section highlights works that illustrate the multiple possibilities thus offered, from image generation and modification to the creation of text and sound. Several artists use generative AI models to explore historical gaps and lacunae (Egor Kraft, Alexia Achilleos and Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert), while others use them to question the social and political biases of AI (Nora Al-Badri, Nouf Aljowaysir), or to produce alternative, counter-factual histories (Grégory Chatonsky, Justine Emard and Gwenola Wagon). The question of the new algorithmic links that AI establishes between words and images is also tackled, for example in the works of Taller Estampa and Erik Bullot.
The section on generative AI, film and video also offers an opportunity to reflect on the transformations brought about by AI on perception and visual narration, as illustrated by works by Inès Sieulle, Andrea Khôra and Jacques Perconte. A whole section is also devoted to generative literature: the production of texts using algorithms, be they poems, novels or even unknown alphabets. The exhibition closes on the theme of music, masterfully illustrated by Christian Marclay’s The Organ, in which a connected keyboard activates combinations of fragments of videos circulating on the social media Snapchat and sharing the same sound frequencies.
Throughout the exhibition, a series of “time capsules” inspired by cabinets of curiosities offer a historical counterpoint to the contemporary works. They tackle subjects such as the history of the automation of computation, production and communication; the relationship between contemporary machine vision systems and past attempts to automate visual perception; the origins of face and emotion recognition systems in the history of artistic, criminological and racial physiognomics; the roots of current AI prompts in the history of the relations between words and images, and of the artworks consisting of instructions given to the viewer. Considered together, these “time capsules” offer a genealogical perspective on current AI developments, placing them within a broader cultural, artistic and scientific history.
To accompany the exhibition, Jeu de Paume is presenting a rich programme of events around AI, including a series of film screenings, lectures by artists and researchers, three different conferences and the theatrical staging of a fictional “trial of AI”. Finally, a catalogue in French and English, featuring contributions by authors working on the links between AI, visual culture and contemporary art, completes this exploration.
Following on from the exhibition The Supermarket of Images (2020), which tackled the proliferation of images in our contemporary societies, The World Through AI extends this reflection by focusing on a new and vast phenomenon, that of artificial intelligence, which is profoundly transforming the production, circulation and reception of images, thereby reorganising our visual relationship with the world.
General curator : Antonio Somaini
Associate curators : Ada Ackerman, Alexandre Gefen, Pia Viewing
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