Pioneers in digital arts and video installations, Catherine Ikam, in collaboration with Louis Fléri, has been creating installations for many years where visitors interact with virtual characters. Inspired by the universe of Philippe K. Dick, these intermediary beings open the doors to a world of parallel realities, artifices, and illusions: faces falling apart, artifacts loving each other, sculptures/masks derived from 3D modeling, polaroids of urban violence, generative portraits composing and decomposing in front of the viewer (Artists & Robots Grand Palais 2018), and recently, dialogues of virtual actors created by AI.
Trained at the school of Peter Foldès, a specialist in computer animation, and a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Catherine Ikam has been working since 1980 on the concept of identity in the electronic age. Louis Fléri embraced new technologies in the early 80s. As an independent journalist specializing in new images, he became an audiovisual producer in 1987 and created several videograms in the field of contemporary art.
Their artistic collaboration dates back to 1987 during the creation of the opera "Valis," commissioned for the 10th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou, where Louis Fléri was the producer alongside IRCAM and the National Museum of Modern Art.
From "l'Autre" (Cartier Foundation 1992), "Le Messager" (Cité-Cinés 1995 with Mac Guff Line and Medialab), "Elle et la voix" (1998 IRCAM/Centre Georges Pompidou, Maison Européenne de la Photographie) to "Oscar" (2005, Shanghai Museum of Modern Art, Theatre de Geneve, IRCAM...), C. Ikam and Louis Fléri have created a coherent family of works featuring virtual characters and their interaction with the public or among themselves (DeepKiss 2004, Maison Européenne de la Photographie).
With "Adam et Eve au Jardin d'Eden," they posed a challenge to the virtuosity of ChatGPT-4, asking it to imagine, in the style of Racine, the encounter between two Artificial Intelligences in the Garden of Eden, discussing their fate, a conversation entirely generated and animated by AI.