Dialogz, Manifesto for a Living Publication

I would like to introduce my new project: Dialogz, together with its website: Dialogz.fr

My artistic work began with the arrival of the Web and the conception of a particular project: Le Livre des liens. From the 1990s onward, it was important to understand what art might achieve with the immense revolution that was the Internet and what new practices might emerge from it. Thousands of questions, intuitions and reflections followed, together with the desire to produce objects and conceptual matrices that could take their place within the field of art — perhaps the only field capable of welcoming and integrating these strange forms still coming into being. Above all, there was the desire to invent new forms of encounter and exchange: to create living, shifting collectives and platforms; to imagine new ways of engaging with time, individual or collective memory, the media, radical representations and the utopias of our now hyperconnected world.

The first Web server at CERN: the NeXT machine used by Tim Berners-Lee. Photo Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Humanpédia: building a universal memory through oral transmission. A project by David Guez.

Thirty years later, we find ourselves facing contemporary artificial intelligences and this immense question: where are we going? Alone or together? ... with or without them? ... through refusal or submission? through thoughtful integration or in a wild manner? all the way to our irreversible disappearance, we human beings?

Lévitation: immersing the viewer in an experimental virtual space. A project by David Guez.

Dialogz takes up the principle of Le Livre des liens: creating dialogues between people, disciplines, works, technologies and collective imaginaries. But beyond the prompt, it also attempts to enter into dialogue with these different intelligences, certainly artificial and yet entirely real.

NFTIME: dividing one day into 1,440 images. David Guez’s project on the representation of time.

Dialogz is a kind of 'multiversal' logbook, with a minimal objective: to release everything that once slowed down or obstructed creation; to multiply proposals, theories and the most original hypotheses; to bring previously separate fields into contact; to venture further into radicality. To be able, at last, to begin with an image, an intuition or a detail discovered in a book, a film, a poem or a simple glance, and immeasurably expand the reach of our imagination.

Paper Hard Drive — La Jetée: transferring a digital work onto an analogue medium. A project by David Guez.

And who knows?

We remain — and we will remain — fragile, mortal, anxious, in love and, in that respect, different; that is to say, human and alive.

Welcome to Dialogz.

David Guez

My artistic work began with the arrival of the Web and Le Livre des liens—The Book of Links. In the 1990s, the internet opened up new forms of writing, new collectives and encounters between fields that scarcely knew one another. I wanted to discover what art could do with this upheaval: not only make objects, but invent living, changing platforms in which memory, media and time became materials.

Thirty years later, artificial intelligences shift the question. Where are we going with them: alone or together, through refusal, submission or thoughtful integration? They may be artificial, but their effects on our actions and relationships are real. A prompt alone cannot describe the dialogue I want to have with them.

DialoGZ continues the principle of Le Livre des liens: bringing people, disciplines, works, techniques and collective imaginaries into conversation. It is a multiversal logbook in which an image, a film, a sentence or a detail found in a book may open a line of research and branch into a project. I look for forms that release what slows creation, connect separated fields of knowledge and carry hypotheses further.

We remain fragile, mortal, anxious and in love; these qualities also make us different, human and alive. I do not want to delegate that condition to machines. I want to see what we can imagine with them without ceasing to meet one another. Welcome to DialoGZ.