Anticipation – AI, Language and Narrative
Overview by Eva Quintas and Stéphanie Morissette
The world is in ferment in the face of the development of artificial intelligence (AI), which is pushing limits in every field, including those of expression through language and the construction of narratives. On the level of human language, AI is generating large language models which reproduce its nuances and complexities. These tools offer a promising future for the thousands of world languages seen to be endangered. Nevertheless, the quantity and quality of the linguistic data available remain major obstacles.
The rise of generative AI also profoundly interrogates the concepts of language, narrative and, more broadly, writing and literature. The increasing number of fictional narratives blurs the boundaries between the authentic and the simulated, raising fundamental questions around the concepts invention, creation and co-creation. Does AI generate stories we would not have thought of? What new narrative forms are emerging from these collaborations? What new fictional imaginaries arise out of them?
Cybernetics and science fiction are classical references in the narrative forms generated by AI. They have produced the first depictions of androids and robots in relation to humanity — in a vision at times apocalyptic and at times empathic towards the machine. Today, the fictional depiction of AI is evolving as technology changes. Its omnipresence, like its immateriality, is a source of new spectulative (non)fiction and myths around the future of humanity. “In a world in which society has become artificial, could artificial intelligence create a society?” (Olivier Paquet, Les machines-fantômes, 2019). How do the concepts utopia, dystopia and uchronia continue to shape the imaginary of AI?
Under the theme Anticipation – AI, Language and Narrative , TOPO is planning the series of exhibitions, interventions and collaborations animating its autumn 2026 to winter 2028-29 seasons.
2026-2029 Programming
The selected projects approach in different forms the ways artificial intelligence has revisited our relations with language and narrative. Typewriters and transliteration machines (Béland and Hétu, Meunier) rub shoulders with a system of generative poetry (Velasco and Langarica). Large language models (LLM) are taken over and thwarted to bring out the subversive potential of languages deemed minor (Porry). Some projects draw on classical works of science fiction (Chiron) while others develop new speculative narratives in the form of installations and performances (Béland et Hétu, Laborare, Laporte, Pesot). For its part, the culture of the Internet and social media reveals collective languages in the process of mutation and new uses and imaginaries (Hamel).
Some of the artworks embody the tensions and negotiations specific to human-machine relations. Several artists have adopted a critical attitude towards socio-technical issues around technology, in particular by exploring the cultural biases in predictive models and by calling into question the classical models tied up with monopolies (Li, Jones, Porry). Others have sought to reduce human-machine boundaries through mentoring relations with AI, collaborative creation and collective experiences (Andres, Li, Laborare, Velasco et Langarica). Some of of the artists connect technology to ecological and feminist ecosystems, in particular through engaged sensorial experiences (Andrthand frugal information systems (Béland et Hétu, Hamel, Li, Meunier), make it possible to see AI as bringing hope while at the same time cultivating critical and reflexive distance from their omnipresence. Artificial intelligence remains a mirror which constructs digital representations of ourselves out of our data (Hamel, Meunier, Pesot). At a time when our images and creations are increasingly co-produced with machines, the impact on individual identity is manifold low tech and frugal information systems (Béland et Hétu, Hamel, Li, Meunier), make it possible to see AI as bringing hope while at the same time cultivating critical and reflexive distance from their omnipresence. Artificial intelligence remains a mirror which constructs digital representations of ourselves out of our data (Hamel, Meunier, Pesot). At a time when our images and creations are increasingly co-produced with machines, the impact on individual identity is manifold — , with this identity becoming less and less fixed and increasingly fluid and modulated.
In these ways the artists explore the way in which machines interact and produce forms, narratives and behaviour, often in order to examine our relationship with technology and with the way humans and objects co-exist. What emerges is the conviction that que intelligence comes not from the tool but rather from the user who thinks about it and with it.
Véronique Béland and Julie Hétu - ARCHÉOSTÉNOGRAPHE
Display window exhibition, November - December 2026
A prehistoric typewriter which generates myths on the future of humanity.
Sébastien Pesot - Le Vrai du Faux
→ Display window exhibition, January - February 2027
Le Vrai du Faux is a video installation in which AI-generated avatars call into question the concepts author, identity and truth in the post-truth age.
Jeanne Hamel - 100 jours de brainrot
→ Display window exhibition, March - April 2027
A research-creation project based on the daily collection of memes and images online for one hundred days.
Maurice Jones - settler-native-slave
→ Display window exhibition, May - June 2027
settler-native-slave is a durational research-creation project that weaves the rhythms of Black and Indigenous resistance to algorithmic oppression and data colonialism through embodied and regenerative sound.
Hugo Nadeau - L'Euguélion (Version IA)
→ Research-creation residency, Summer 2027
Fifty years after L’Euguélionne, the power chessboard is radically rearranged by feminism on the march. But Predation concedes only to win, and win more each time. A thousand Romes later, the globalisation of the Milky Way of trillionares has only begun. Pre-order your copy of L’Euguélion (version IA), a cystic novel, the first interplanetary success of the book not yet written.
Albertine Meunier - Qui est là ?
→ Display window exhibition, September - October 2027
The installation Qui est là ? is a machine for prompting AI images. Visitors stand in front of the machine and type their prompt. An image is generated in real time according to the typed prompt and appears on the screen of the prompt machine.
Olivain Porry - Syncrétisme synthétique
→ Display window exhibition, September - October 2027
Syncrétisme synthétique employs a kind of artificial linguistic creolising. Three AI agents, each of them employing a different language and different cultural references: Standard English, Louisiana Creole and Louisiana French. The machines correct one another and rewrite artificial poems until they make an algorithmic writing emerge, made out of bugs, errors and neologisms, showing the biases and limits of AI.
Eyez Li - TamagochU!
→ Display window exhibition, January - February 2028
TamagotchU is an agentic puffer fish lore of the audience's collective emotions, and their shadow-self.
Mariane Laporte - Immaculée Conception Inc.
→ Display window exhibition, March - April 2028
What if pregnancy took place outside the biological body? A fertility clinic invites expectant parents to bond with their fetus by telling it a story, which is then transformed into images based on their body temperature.
LABORARE - Figurations Hantologiques
→ Display window exhibition, May - June 2028
Figurations Hantologiques is an interdisciplinary triptych located at the crossroads of media art and theatre. The project uses a series of experimental protocols to create new hybrid writing practices by placing the know-how of the actors centre stage. The triptych explores the figure of the phantom and the processes of human haunting memories and media through the stories of three women living on the fringes of society, fringes in turn economic, geographic and those of gender.
Kelly Andres - SPORE SCHOOL
→ Display window exhibition, September - October 2028
SPORE SCHOOL est une classe écologique expérimentale où les visiteurs, les lichens, la météo, le langage et l’intelligence artificielle participent à un système d’apprentissage commun. Grâce à une interface interactive, des observations écologiques recueillies localement sont transformées en textes évolutifs, glyphes inspirés des lichens, images et sons, afin d’imaginer ce que pourrait devenir une IA qui apprendrait à prêter attention plutôt qu’à extraire.
Arthur Chiron - « D'après » [After]
→ Display window exhibition, November - December 2028
« D'après » [After] is a selection of works exploring the tensions between narrative, code and cryptography where each piece appropriates, recomposes or encrypts an existing literary or visual work, revealing the plasticity of language. Across a range of forms from a simple poster to a more complex mechatronic device, language is turned into an erratic word list, a palimpsest, an anagram, an entropic poem or a form of meta-cryptography.
Rodrigo Velasco & Lola Langarica - Alabanza (jardín florido)
→ Display window exhibition, January - February 2029
Alabanza (Jardín Florido) is a poem that expands into code, inviting AI into dialogue with its readers: pressing a key doesn’t input text but makes it bloom, turning gesture into petals. Presented as a living, multilingual organism, the piece grows from a web-based generative poem into a physical installation of projection, video mapping and a tended garden, meant not just to be read, but inhabited.
