Gwenola Wagon

Installation

You wanted to be a real artist with a proper studio, where you could hide away and paint with genuine brushstrokes. You wanted to fling paint about, let it flow with energy. You wanted to rediscover ancient, primal, memorable gestures – the gestures of Janet Sobel, before the drippings of Pollock, or of Joan Mitchell, Joyce Pensato and Katharina Grosse. You wished you could be like them. You wished you were them.

At first, the machines help you. Artificial intelligence brings to life the forms you imitate. You thought the forms were silent and motionless, but the machines give them movement and a voice. The forms speak to you. They send you signals. You can’t sleep any more, or leave your room, or close your eyes. You are stunned.

Little by little, you realise that the forms brought to life by neural networks are merely making noise—a noise that gently hypnotises. You understand that the machines have stolen everything from us. They have stolen the love affair we had with these forms.

So you run away, you smash through the ceiling, pierce the floor. You cover the shapes in paint to silence them. You go out, you hide in the forests, you draw on the rocks, you paint directly on the sea and the clouds, colours that belong to no one. The machines are always following you; watching you and trying to recognise your traces, as if they were their own and as if all of this belonged to them.

One day, you’ll be able to close your eyes. Breathe freely. You’ll be a spider, a wolf, a tree, a stone, lichen, a snail, ants, a bird. You’ll be nature.

Gwenola Wagon

Découvrir le profil

University of Paris 1. Using installations, films, performances and books, she devises alternative and paradoxical narratives to reflect on the contemporary digital world. She has been round the virtual globe with her early films *Globodrome* and *Blackpool-Manchester*. In collaboration with the artist Stéphane Degoutin, she has co-directed numerous works, including *Cyborgs dans la brume* and *World Brain*, *La maison qui vous veut du bien*, the installation *Cat Loves Pig*, and the book *Psychanalyse de l’aéroport international*. Following *Erewhon* and *Virusland*, two post-cybernetic fables, she published the book *Planète B,* an essay blending investigation and fiction the better to get to grips with a fast-growing monster. She created the installation *Chroniques du soleil noir* in partnership with the Paris Observatory for *Prendre le soleil* at Hangar Y, exhibited as part of the exhibition *Le monde selon l’IA*. The installation *Janet et les robots* is part of her research into creation in the age of generative AI, following the composition of *Images pyromanes*, a book published in 2025 and in 2026 for the English edition of Set Margins.

Production

Credits