A post-apocalyptic Paris created thanks to AI in an exhibition and a book

The Grand Gallery of the Louvre? Devastated. The colored pipes of the Center Pompidou? Ravaged by rust. And the Eiffel Tower? Exploded into a thousand pieces. It’s a surprisingly sublime vision of horror that we offer Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre with The Ruins of Parisa beautiful book published by Albin Michel. 80 images of a post-apocalyptic Paris, some of which are exhibited at the Polka gallery until January 18, 2025.

Specialists inurbex (a practice of “urban exploration” which consists of visiting abandoned places), the duo of photographers known for their work around contemporary ruin has seized a tool that worries some and fascinates others: artificial intelligence. Accustomed to the photographic camera for 20 years, the two adventurers wanted to confront this divisive technology, revolutionizing our relationship with reality and art.

52,000 AI-generated images

Disturbing works of realism, with an aesthetic close to the paintings of Hubert Robert…

While at the same time, one of their prints was presented in the exhibition “Formes de la ruine” at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, Marchand and Meffre decided to delve into the intricacies of software specializing in picture Midjourney. Their idea? “Exploring the motif of ruin throughout Paris, giving substance to our ruinenlust (“obsession with ruins”, editor’s note) and our post-apocalyptic concerns. » Operating gropingly, the artists “prompted” – that is, giving textual instructions to a generative AI – relentlessly.

Result : 52 000 images were generated in total to produce these 80 disturbing works of realism, with an aesthetic close to the paintings of Hubert Robert (1733–1808), and in particular his poetics View of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in ruins (1796). From a distance, they are fascinating credibility. Up close, we detect visual inconsistencies specific to AI-generated images: indecipherable letters, blurred areas, incorrect perspective… These defects were left as is on purpose, in order to provoke reflection on the origin of these images and what they represent.

Representing the “invisible future”

Thinking about the limits of reality and virtuality: this is a subject that is well known to the author and philosopher who wrote an unpublished text for this work. Nathan Devers. In 2022, the latter published Artificial linksa dystopian novel. For him, the challenge of Marchand and Meffre can be summed up as follows: “show Paris through the prism of Pompeii, describe the Pompeii that Paris could become (…)”. With, nevertheless, an emancipatory horizon: allowing the photographer not only to “archive what is already there” but also to represent “the invisible future that is being woven beneath the current face of our world. »