Julien Prévieux FR
Threat 2
Interactive installation
Exhibition “ Fabulations — Reclaiming Our Voices, Reinventing Language ”
October 30 through January 17, 2027
Wednesday through Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
21 bis, Mirabeau – Departmental Cultural Center
Aix-en-Provence
Credits
Frac Normandie Collection
Menace 2 (Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine) is a piece of furniture that learns to play tic-tac-toe. It is a durable replica of one of the first machines capable of learning. It was created in 1961 by Donald Michie using matchboxes to implement a reinforcement learning algorithm. Reinforcement learning involves identifying the best possible choices in a given situation through trial and error. The best decisions become more likely to occur, while the worst ones gradually become less likely. This algorithm works invisibly in our modern machines, but this drawer-based device allows us to grasp its principles by executing it “physically.”
Julien Prévieux
Julien Prévieux is an artist and professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He creates work that focuses on technologies that organize, measure, and sometimes anticipate human behavior. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as a recent breakthrough, he examines its historical context: the classification systems, measurement protocols, predictive tools, behavioral models, and cybernetic imaginaries that preceded it and made it possible. In this sense, his work is part of a critical archaeology of media and technology, in which contemporary technologies appear as the result of a long history shaped by administrative machines, norms, and constrained bodies. His works take many forms (films, performances, installations, drawings, letters, or protocols) and subvert or slow down computational systems to better reveal their political logic.
A recipient of the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2014, he has presented his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, notably at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, the MAC in Marseille, the RISD Museum of Art in Providence, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the 13th Lyon Biennale, and the 10th Istanbul Biennale. His performances have been presented at the Ménagerie de verre in Paris, the T2G – Théâtre de Gennevilliers, DiverseWorks in Houston, and Usine C in Montreal.
