(THE ARCHAEOSTENOGRAPHER)
For the creation of this generative installation, L’archéosténographe, an artificial intelligence was trained to invent myths about the future of humanity, which it verbalizes using a synthetic voice. These stories, which offer a sense of familiarity due to the place myths occupy in our collective unconscious, are simultaneously transcribed into prehistoric signs by a robotic stenotype – a device for archiving stories that, by their very nature, belong to oral tradition.
The archaeostenographer works according to a rapid writing method that uses phonetics to transcribe speech sounds in real time. Here, the 36 phonemes of the French language have been replaced by as many symbols dating from the Paleolithic period, following a grammar developed by Julie Hétu in her essay "L’écrivain préhistorique". The culmination of six years of doctoral research on the origins of song and writing, she studies the recurrence of abstract motifs in cave art, which abound in most prehistoric assemblages and which many researchers consider to be a form of primitive writing. Within the work, the artificial neural network (SML) is powered by a database compiling the most widespread myths from around the world, dating back to the myth of the Primordial Emergence, dating back to the Paleolithic era, which relates how the human species first lived underground before accessing the surface through a cave and discovering its mortality. Returning to the origins to better formulate its conceptions of the future, the AI takes our collective destiny as its subject with the instruction to aspire to a favorable outcome in its narratives. Born from the machine's singular imagination, the texts produced stand out from predictable propositions to surprise us, bringing forth hope from the unexpected - provided we decipher this form of proto-writing, at first illegible, in which the trace of these discourses is preserved, like so many mysteries to be elucidated. The work thus asserts itself as an alternative to the dominant dystopias, envisioning a future that can push towards action, in contrast to a fatality that afflicts and petrifies. Inspired by the Rosetta Stone as an archetype and a model by which hieroglyphs were originally deciphered, this project was born from a desire, more poetic than scientific, to be able to read or write stories in prehistoric symbols. The physical installation had its world premiere at the Scopitone Festival (Paris) in September 2025. The texts are also the subject of two group exhibitions: "Sous le même ciel" at Cube Garges and Artificial Dreams. Visions of the future at the Grand Palais immersif (Paris). Design and production : Véronique Béland & Julie Hétu