Is the landscape of the unconscious subject to climate change ?
Christophe Bruno is a French artist and researcher, a former resident at Iméra (September 2022 – July 2023), whose work explores the interactions between art, technology, and society. He is known for his exploration of the social, political, and philosophical implications of digital technologies. Bruno is particularly interested in artificial intelligence, surveillance, and the manipulation of information in the digital age.
In April 2024, he participated to “Régimes de lecture” (Reading Regimes), which is part of an initiative focused on literary creation and digital publishing. Alphabetville, a multimedia writing laboratory, and La Marelle, a contemporary literature organization, collaborated within this framework at the Friche Belle de Mai in Marseille. Linked to a digital writing residency, the “Ecrits du numérique” (Digital Writings) are moments of encounters, exchanges, information sharing, but also experimentation of these practices, demonstrations of achievements in the field of digital writing and publishing.
In his discourse on the “Climate Change of the Unconscious,” Christophe Bruno thus proposes a questioning stemming from the reactivation of his work Dreamlogs (2003), confronting the original purpose of his work with the societal upheaval caused by the democratization of the use of conversational agents such as ChatGPT. He wonders, among other things:
- Is ChatGPT Hydropathic, Incoherent, Supremacist, Dadaist, Oulipian, or even New Realist ?
- Is the landscape of the unconscious of capitalism subject to a climate disruption, and what would be its temperature ?
- What structural similarities exist between the unconscious and language models (Large Language Models the broad family of artificial intelligences to which ChatGPT belongs, among others) ?
Further reading :
- Christophe Bruno’s Iméra Alumni page.
- Christophe Bruno’s website.
- The article about Dreamlogs on Christophe Bruno’s website.
