SAMUEL BOUTRUCHE

Machine Learning

26.03.22 – 19.06.22

Quite a few years ago, with a lot of enthusiasm, I started to delegate my address book to my mobile phone. As its abilities increased, I entrusted it with a part of my life: diary, notes.

Now it almost deserves its presumptuous but fortunately outdated name of personal assistant. Over the years, he has been promoted in email responses, he has been upgraded in the management of my travels, the organization of tasks and even my ideas. What surprised me the most was when the applications started to offer me to archive articles for later reading. It seems to me that I am granting part of my autonomy of reflection for an intellectual space latent, a new version of procrastination. I can choose this article, but I reserve the reading for later, perhaps. We learn from our mistakes, but can we learn from what we don’t do. 

One thing is for sure, the GAFAM learn from me and thus track my phone. From personal assistant, he becomes a kind of executive attaché or even associate director. All the new capabilities of my phone have flattered me since I bought it. I am, therefore, its owner, but above all, its superior. If the dematerialization becomes more and more radical, I would no longer have the leisure to buy my phone or these applications; my place at the top of the pyramid would waver. From proprietary of meaning, I will pass to tenant with for the last human quality, can’t make tail or head of anything.

Why not? The machines will have taught me to recognize my natural stupidity.

--- Samuel Boutruche, 2022

CCA Andratx is excited to host the first solo-exhibition of the Paris-based artist Samuel Boutruche (FR, 1979).

The exhibition marks the culmination of the artist’s one-month-stay at the CCA Studios in June of 2021.

Having studied photography, as well as experimented with computer generated images and video games, Boutruche has always been drawn to technical images, their applications and influences. As co-founder of the art collective KOLKOZ, he has referenced numerous forms of technology, with a Pop twist. Since his first work in the early 1990s, Boutruche has constantly played - literally and figuratively - with the effects of simulation. Each of his works represents a duality - of a reality, a person or a form - created by modelling.

PRESS MATERIAL here