As recently stated, artificial intelligence is 'a form of animism for the rich'. For the theoretician, it is the sign of the resurgence, at the heart of our hyper-industrialized societies, of a type of relationship with the world wherein non-entities are bearers of autonomous thought. Artificial intelligence weaves together two radically different ontologies; in the first, AI is the result of a conception of the world in which thought can be dissected into a series of inert and discrete elements (only to be recomposed within a cascade of logical operators), and in the second, it gives rise to a world in which both living and inert matter, thought and death become indistinguishable (and understood uniquely as a non-decomposable totality).

The project that I am currently working on with Raphaël Siboni takes this analysis as a departure point and attempts, at the scale of a film entirely filmed and edited by an intelligent machine, to produce a convergence between a contemporary conception of AI as developed in Silicon Valley and the animism of the Ohlone tribes which lived there before colonization. The film is situated in 1542, the moment when conquistadors landed in the San Francisco bay, and when the animal-gods which reigned there died, leaving behind them a certain logic. It is a film which figures the return of an artificial intelligence to its place of origin, in order to change its future. By using the abstract structure of Ohlone myths to redirect the computational ontology of neural networks, it attempts to operate a bifurcation in History and open up the possibility of a uniquely Ohlone artificial intelligence.

Fabien Giraud was born in 1980. He presently lives and works in Paris, France. Since 2007 he has collaborated extensively with the artist and filmmaker Raphael Siboni with whom he has exhibited internationally(Palais de Tokyo – 2008, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris – 2009, Santa Fe Biennial -2008, Moscow Biennial 2009, Sharjah Art Foundation – 2013, Biennale de Lyon 2015 ). Since 2014, their new and ongoing body of works entitled has been presented in a series of monographic shows in Luxembourg(Casino Luxembourg), Canada(Vox in Montreal) and France(Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Ile de Vassiviere). In 2011 he co-founded the series of seminars and workshops entitled addressing questions regarding the geological concept of the Anthropocene and its consequences for the theory of art. In 2012, he co-initiated – a research platform and a journal – launched in 2014 through a series of events in New York and Paris.