über Justine Emard

Justine Emard is a visual artist. She lives and works in Paris. Her works of art explore the new relationships that are developing between human life and technologies. The combination of different visual media places her work at the intersection of neuroscience, objects, organic life, and artificial intelligence.
Her work has been exhibited at the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and in museums such as the NRW Forum (Düsseldorf), the ZKM (Karlsruhe), the National Museum of Singapore, the Cinémathèque Québécoise (Montréal), the MOT Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), the Barbican Center (London) and the World Museum (Liverpool).


Website of Justine Emard

Soul Shift

Zinkfabrik Altenberg, Oberhausen

In her video Soul Shift, French artist Justine Emard stages the meeting of two generations of a humanoid robot. Projected onto an interior facade of Zinkfabrik Altenberg’s rolling hall, the film follows two androids equipped with rudimentary artificial intelligence who become aware of their surroundings and their own presence via sensors and gestures. The process of supposedly becoming human is transferred from one generation of robots to the next.

Soul Shift speculates on the encounter with a version of oneself and raises questions about the translocation of knowledge and identity. The video is one of several artworks created in Japan since 2016 in collaboration with scientists Hiroshi Ishiguro (Osaka University) and Takashi Ikegami (University of Tokyo). Based on the research paradigm that life-like actions can be learned based on signals and sensors, Soul Shift illuminates the impact that transferring knowledge, developed from “learned experiences”, can have on a next generation.

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