ECHO is a mirror for talking to yourself. You enter a small black cabin. Once seated, your reflection appears. Start talking to it, and after a few seconds, it will respond using your previously spoken words.
The artificial intelligence of the device ensures that the tone remains harmonious within the conversation, often with a sense of enigma. The visitor remains free to interpret the responses and to guide the course of the discussion according to their desires.
Guillaume Faure / Echo
PhD in AI: Cyril Laurier
Creative coder: Joan Sandoval
Acknowledgments: Cléo Paradis, Antoni Hadzijanev, and Edouard Decam
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Instagram @echolamachine
In Greek mythology, the goddess Echo loves Narcissus, who rejects her. She gradually transforms into a rock until nothing remains of her but her voice, which echoes Narcissus's lamentations. Narcissus, enslaved by his own image and unable to love, ultimately dies of love for himself."
Our perception of reality is an illusion, nourished notably by our projections. When ECHO presents us to ourselves as if we were someone else, it invites us to observe ourselves from a distance. This observation is made through the lense of our point of view on reality. We then live through a disturbing experience without understanding it, a mise en abyme of our subjectivity: our biased gaze encounters the paradoxes of its twin.
ALEA is a small space where one to four people can enter to converse. The machine records sound continuously. It will use the gathered speech to surprise the participants and attempt to disrupt the course of their interaction.
Through the staggered repetition of phrases, the device gives our words another meaning by changing their context: the intention they carry takes precedence over the meaning, creating surprise and potentially altering our perception of the ongoing discussion, as well as ourselves.
Guillaume Faure / Alea
AI Doctorate: Cyril Laurier
Creative coder: Joan Sandoval
Acknowledgments: Cléo Paradis, Antoni Hadzijanev
ALEA is a prototype of artificial intelligence whose purpose is to explore influence mechanisms to disrupt automatism in social interactions, thus inviting us to rethink our relationships with others.
SOMA is presented as a single-user interactive cinema room controlled by the viewer's emotions. Isolated from the outside world, the viewer is immersed in a combination of moving images and sounds. Physiological sensors monitor the viewer's emotions, which dynamically alter the video editing, thereby eliciting further emotions that in turn interact. The experience lasts approximately 5 minutes.
SOMA serves as a bridge between body and mind, an instinctive experience where the body dictates the narrative choices. The goal of this setup is to stimulate the viewer's perspective on the content they receive. The massage, a sharp excitement of numb flesh to allow blood to flow, is exercised here on the muscle of emotional memory.
"The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao" (Lao Tzu)
Guillaume Faure / SOMA
Design: Andres Gleixner
Creative coder: Emilien Ghomi
Data analysis and machine learning: Ivan Cester
Music: Aalderick de Vries & Thomas Spitz
Soma’s second iteration - Festival EXIT in Créteil - 2015
Like a sonar, SOMA maps the traces of our memories. Through their echo, it reflects our emotional history back to us.
The machine invites an intimate dialogue with yourself. The personalized narrative, composed of abstract images and sounds, functions like a cocoon for the meaning that each person projects onto it.
The active biofeedback during the experience lends the machine a form of virtual empathy for the visitor. The viewer-actor thus becomes a subject on par with the experience.
The subtlety lies in the invisible, the elusive. It's in this in-between, between dream and reality, that SOMA invites us. The machine grants us access to different levels of abstraction, gradually transitioning from the vague to the distinct.
The viewer is invited to confront what these suggestions evoke to them. This creative encounter with their intimacy can take on an infinite number of forms.
Soma’s first version - ACM multimedia 2013 in Barcelona’s design museum.
MANGE-RÊVE is a project bringing together artists and scientists collaborating to create a dream-inducing machine: Audio-visual content is altered based on physiological measurements taken from the visitor, in order to personalize their experience of this dream according to their feelings. This system aims to be a potential purging mechanism for the psyche.
In a feverish dream, one constant often emerges: the instability of dimensions. Volumes and time change, opposites coexist in striking contrasts.
Joan Miró, in his abstract period, shows, experiences, but does not tell. The visual structures, textures, and types of animations with which the machine has been fed, attempt to adhere to this same rule.
MangeReve / Guillaume Faure
Design: Adrien Lambert and Marina Pujadas
Software: Frederic Menez
Music: Aalderick de Vries
This project is the first step in a research endeavor on behavior. The purpose of this machine is to offer people the opportunity to have waking dreams, consistent with their emotional state and personality.
In this moving tableau, abstractions of human pulsations express themselves in shapes sometimes organic and colorful, sometimes in suggestive animations, or even through centrifugal shifts inviting vertigo or flight.
Guillaume has been working for 20 years as a director of photography for artists, advertising, music videos and fictions.
Below are some stills of projects with the artists Agnes Guillaume and Mouawad-Laurier, the musicians Tom Agad and Monsieur Shwill, and for the brands Ruinart and Wookids.
More is visible at www.easy.barcelona
Guillaume learnt color grading with Yves Lepeillet in Buf, then worked for instance with :
Directors : Marc Caro, David Lynch, Lou Yé, Eran Riklis, Nathalie Canguilhem, Jonas et François, Megaforce, Jalil Lespert, Jordi Evole.
Productors : Buf, B-Mac, El niño, Soixan7e Quin5e, Irene, Partizan, FCB, Vice.
Artists : Selah Sue, Mika, Booba, Louis Cyprien Rials, Blanca Li.
