The Feral

Feral

A one-thousand-year-long film fully shot and edited by an artificial intelligence.

32 generations of humans.

A transformed landscape.

A multitude of authors.

Broadcast live from 2024 to 3024.

Oeuvre

The Feral is a collective artwork at the scale of a landscape - a place of learning for an artificial intelligence in charge of creating a 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.

Site

The Feral is deployed on a site spanning several hectares at the top of a hill, within the Millevaches Plateau Regional Natural Park in France. This site aims to gradually expand, enlarging the learning ground for the artificial intelligence over the years. The previously clear-cut parcels, exploited by the timber industry, will be replanted, diversified, and preserved.

Institut

The Institute is a research and education platform that unfolds the concrete concepts and experiences developed within The Feral, along with their philosophical, technological, and political implications. It is structured around three axes: an artist and researcher residency program, an online school, and an annual publication.

A PROPOS

The Feral is an artistic, educational, and environmental project led by the non-profit organization 3024, based on an original idea by artists Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni.

Fabien Giraud, Raphaël Siboni & Anne Stenne

Co-founders & Artistic co-directors

Ida Soulard

Institute Director

Chloé Lopes

Administrator

contact@theferal.org

For further information, please contact us at :

The Feral

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Introduction

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).

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.