Hicham Berrada

Installation

Le Jardin des Mutations (The Garden of Changes) brings the ancient art of divination together with artificial intelligence in order to conjure up a parallel world that mirrors a real garden. This dialogue between oracles and calculations has its roots in history: in 1701, the philosopher and mathematician Leibniz discovered a binary system in the I Ching, a Chinese oracular work dating back three thousand years made up of 64 combinations of solid and broken lines in. This is the origin of the modern binary code, the foundation of all computing.

Inspired by this strange filiation, Le Jardin des mutations transforms meteorological data – temperature, hygrometry, wind – into as many throws of the dice, constantly generating new metamorphoses inspired by the I Ching. As if in interlocking worlds, the virtual garden evolves as an echo of the real garden. Changes in our world cause a constantly reconfiguring virtual landscape to emerge, mutate and run wild. The known world slowly shifts towards phantasmagorical territories.

Le Jardin des mutations is a bridge between the physical and digital worlds, between the distant past and the speculative future. It is a porous space where the boundaries between material reality and the worlds of the mind are blurred, inviting us to contemplate a shifting elsewhere, where the known dissolves into the unknown.

Hicham Berrada

Born in Casablanca in 1986, lives and works in Roubaix. Trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains. His work has been shown at the Louvre-Lens, the Yokohama Triennial and the Hayward Gallery in London.

Production

Credits