L'attente
2026
L’attente imagines a space that holds, in latent form, every image that has ever existed, every image that exists today, and every image yet to come.
Its algorithm, designed to explore every possible combination of pixel colours in a digital image, sets out to exhaust all the possibilities of this almost infinite space. At thirty images per second, nearly a billion a year, it relentlessly pursues this process from a fixed starting time. A recognizable image might emerge at any time, briefly taking shape and then dissolving again into noise. Yet the sheer number of possibilities makes such a fleeting appearance almost unattainable, as the unlikely outcome of an endless wait.
This random exploration stands in contrast to artificial intelligence, which instead learns to navigate a tiny fraction of this space to produce recognizable pictures. Where generative models favour certain configurations, L’attente makes no distinction. Standing on the threshold between latent image and latent space, the work explores the gap separating the possibility of an image from its appearance.
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