MIRABIL-IA Centre des Arts, Enghien

MIRABIL-IA explored the profound transformations taking place in artistic creation through the development of artificial intelligence. Moving beyond narratives that frame AI primarily as a threat to creativity, the exhibition focused on artists working at the intersection of art, science, and technology, using artificial intelligence to generate unexpected associations, new visual languages, and alternative ways of perceiving the world.

The exhibition brought together visual, moving-image, and sound-based works in which AI becomes a source of renewed wonder. Through unfamiliar combinations and sometimes uncanny forms, the participating artists proposed poetic realities that depart from our own, demonstrating how computational systems can expand creative processes rather than simply automate them.

At the heart of MIRABIL-IA was the idea that the latent spaces of generative artificial intelligence can be understood as contemporary equivalents of historical cabinets of curiosities: immense repositories containing countless forms, fragments, categories, and representations of the world. Emerging during the Renaissance and flourishing throughout the eighteenth century, cabinets of curiosities assembled specimens from the animal, vegetal, and mineral kingdoms in an attempt to capture the diversity and strangeness of nature.

The works selected for MIRABIL-IA echoed this tradition of collecting, combining, and reclassifying forms. Through artificial intelligence, the artists explored new ways of observing nature, organizing knowledge, and creating hybrid entities—continuing a lineage that stretches from early collections of natural wonders to the composite imaginaries of André Breton’s collages and Joseph Cornell’s boxes.

Presented as part of Bains Numériques #11, International Biennial of Digital Arts

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Participating artists:

Entangled Others
Collectif Estampa
Nao Tokui
aurèce vettier
Primavera de Filippi
Ilan Manouach

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