Marine de Dardel, (DES)ASTRES.ai (2025)
(DES)ASTRES.aiexamines the various degrees of reality and their relative modes of existence. Combining analogue with digital creative practices and experimentation with various generative tools, the video essay attempts to make use of the potential of AI to render visible something ungraspable, an unnameable quality that cannot be merely quantified: It simulates the experience of an intimate encounter with a fleeting entity haunting the virtual realm and questioning the bodily locus of identity. Endowed with speech, it recites a disjointed interior monologue. Originally based on a series of conversations held with the chatbot Claude.ai, the discourse was further developed according to the stream of consciousness narrative mode, most accurately depicting “the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind” (Cuddon: 660-1) of the avatar.