Thomas Pendeliau

Film

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In the depths of a transformed Earth lies an ark dedicated to preserving the world's memory, an ultimate repository where the biological traces of life merge with the digital records of knowledge. Its preservation is entrusted to autonomous machines that watch over the rebirth of plants and the emergence of children conceived outside the body.

But from this static memory, a mutation is taking place: more than a mere archive, the site becomes the incubator of an unprecedented symbiosis—a post-human cohabitation free from hierarchies, where the organic and the digital forge a new way of worlding.

This harmony, however, comes at a price: a newfound dependency on the very technology that orchestrates it. Is this controlled utopia a cradle or a tomb? And what becomes of kinship and memory when they are no longer passed down, but calculated?

The very form of the film embodies this hybridization. Driven by a chimerical image where live-action footage and AI-generated visions fuse into a continuous flow, the film becomes a speculative reverie, an immersion into a beauty that is at once gentle and unsettling.

Thomas Pendeliau

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Thomas Pendeliau is a french artist-researcher. Transdisciplinary, his practice spans film, installation and the still image. His speculative approach probes the agency of contemporary imaginaries in the face of ecological, technological and scientific transformations. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles, and in art history and archaeology from the University of Burgundy, he is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Lille. Informed by science fiction literature, anthropology and posthumanist philosophy, his work draws on the life sciences and the challenges of biotechnology. Artificial intelligence has been central to his practice since 2020, both a medium and an object of critical inquiry. His projects have been shown at the NOÛS festival at the BnF, the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles, Octobre numérique, the Rencontres de la jeune photographie internationale in Niort and the Lumière d'Encre art centre, among others.

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