Introduction  

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The Feral is a film shot over the course of the next 1000 years. Borrowing its title from zoological terminology which refers to any captive animal that has become wild again as ‘feral’, this project aims to induce a similar de-domestication process within ourselves and our world.

The Feral is a collective artwork at the scale of a landscape - a place of learning for an artificial intelligence in charge of creating this film. This environment, as it grows, is progressively populated and transformed by the interventions of artists invited to feed its learning, as many co-authors of this «concrete fiction» for the next 1000 years.

The Feral is a social experiment. A group of humans are engaged to take part in it all throughout their lifetime as actors of the film and material support for the training of the artificial intelligence. The experiment is meant to continue with the participants’ descendance over 32 generations (1000 years).

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This project takes its origin in the following postulate: what truly matters in the current development of artificial intelligences is less the quality of the autonomous systems that we set up than the retroactive effect of the training of these systems on ourselves as a species as well as on the physical environment that we call ‘nature’. It aims at testing a hypothesis : the more one becomes the material support for the training of an artificial intelligence at acquiring knowledge and at following rules, the more that person unlearns and liberates herself from these very rules. In short, the more domesticated a machine system gets, the more ‘feral’ we become.