Nicolas Pirus

Film

In the not-too-distant future, ML, a researcher at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, has been commissioned to work for FINOSA, a multinational pharmaceutical company that offers patronage in exchange for patentable discoveries. While browsing through the museum’s digital archives, ML comes across some unusual data: entries for plants that do not exist.

This discovery leads him on an investigation in the footsteps of an old artificial intelligence programme designed to analyse botanical collections in search of new industrial applications. This programme, which had fallen into disuse, seems to have evolved in unexpected ways.

By confronting Western scientific classification systems and the memories they have silenced, this animated film explores the tensions between indexing, preservation, forgetting and erasure. At the dawn of an artificial intelligence capable of extracting, storing and processing ever-growing volumes of “data” – seen here as “catches” – it sets out to question our relationship with living things and the ethics involved in creating these digital memories.

Nicolas Pirus

Nicolas Pirus is a French artist born in 1993. He graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Bourges in 2018 and from the Ensba Lyon post-graduate art course in 2022, and lives and works in Saint-Étienne. In work that combines experimental cinema, 3D animation and installation, he explores relationships with memory, the land and their domination. His work has been shown at the CIAP de Vassivière, the CAC le Creux de l'Enfer (Thiers), the FRAC Lorraine (Metz), the CDN la Comédie de Caen, the Serre (Saint-Étienne), the Réfectoire des nonnes (Lyon) and the Beursschouwburg (Brussels).

Production

Credits