Gwenola Wagon

Like in cinema, the images unfold, retracing the history of a seaside resort: the dune landscapes of its beginnings, the golden age of holidays, the environmental catastrophe. Except this isn’t cinema. The images are generated by Artificial Intelligence. Each image comes with its variants. It is an anarchive—in which one should hear both anarchy and anachronism. The multiplication of images is also their hypnotic derealization and the erasure of the very meaning of the archive within a time possessing thousands of dimensions.

What remains to be seen is whether these images succeed in revealing the more-than-human reality of the environmental crisis, or whether it hides behind the filter effects of an eternal present. We are standing at the edge of time.

From the chapter “Anarchives” of our book Pyromaniac Images. Theory-Fiction of Generative AIs.