The Facts
On October 29, 2026, the Centre Pompidou published an interview with French artist Elsa Werth (b. 1985) tied to the online exhibition “Nos chimères sont-elles ce qui nous ressemble le mieux ?” (“Do Our Chimeras Most Resemble Us?”), co-organized with KADIST. Werth discusses IF/THEN (2024), a 42-minute silent color video made with generative AI, for which she fed AI systems an image bank of ordinary objects. The conversation also covers Magic Stick, painted wooden beams evoking rolling news tickers, and Three Shifts (2019–2020), a video clock built from 1,440 one-minute films of Adhex Technologies employees’ hands in Chenôve, France, as well as “Le titre à l’œuvre,” her writing workshops in Massy based on titles of Centre Pompidou collection works.
The Signal
Werth’s practice reflects a wider institutional turn toward treating AI as a subject of critique rather than spectacle, foregrounding materiality, labor, and “counter-uses” of everyday objects. Her participatory projects with factory workers and residents point to a growing curatorial interest in art embedded in working life. For artists, her method models how to disrupt standardized production and reclaim imaginative space from machine logic.
- Artists: Elsa Werth
- People: Nicolas Ballet
- Galleries: KADIST
- Museums: Centre Pompidou, Centre Pompidou Francilien
- Locations: Paris, Massy, Chenôve
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