The World Through AI at Jeu de Paume

Another of the year’s major institutional surveys of AI-driven art, The World Through AI at Paris’s Jeu de Paume, framed artificial intelligence as a split field. It distinguished analytical AI (computer vision, facial recognition) from generative AI, asking how each reshapes our experience of the world. The show brought together around thirty artists working across sculpture, painting, video and installation, with many pieces commissioned or previously unseen, spanning works from 2016 to the present. It opened with a deliberately physical gesture: Julian Charrière’s Metamorphism LI sculptures, cast from artificial lava and melted e-waste, anchoring AI’s supposedly immaterial systems in raw material cost. From there the exhibition moved through projects that mock machine perception, expose the hidden labor underpinning automated platforms, and implicate the viewer directly, as in Hito Steyerl’s installation, where seated visitors become objects available for tagging. The show ultimately wanted to shape how audiences thought about “AI” moving forward. It showed its multifaceted potential, distinguishing generative from analytic, as well as its dangers.