The Machine Seems to Need a Ghost

Artificial intelligence raises ethical, artistic and social questions that are only an acceleration of the same questions that have followed the inventions of printing, photography, computer or the internet. The growing automation only makes it harder to escape our current system and the “meta” has become a refuge. This constant self-reference, reflexivity, circularity of our art, our technologies, our culture is becoming a trap where the past’s ghosts still haunt our present thinking.

"[T]wo viewpoints to make sense of the world". In this way David Fathi describes his guiding line. Holding a Master's degree in Computer Science, he combines artistic practice and engineering career with the same affinity for science and the limits of knowledge. His work, be it still or moving image, takes root in various archives and visual databases, depending on the subject, blurring the appropriationist work in the boundaries between documentary and contemporary art. With an intense passion for odd and conflicting facts, David Fathi often tackles them with a biting sense of humor. He hijacks images and reveals gaps and absurdities in the stories he recounts: a subversive visual critique. [...] David Fathi pulls back the curtain, to open up meaning to what is behind the scenes: to counteract documented proof as much as to create new information. At the crossroads of solemnity, banalty and absurdity, his images assert themselves as political.[...] [M]ight David Fathi be trying to reintroduce a spark of idealism in our current cynicism?