Abstract :
[en] Based on the analysis of the artworks In Love with the World (Anicka Yi, Tate Modern, 2021-2022) and Unsupervised (Refik
Anadol, MoMA, 2022-2023), this contribution examines the emergence and stabilization of performative AI installations as
human-machine artistic practices in which new visual registers emerge, are negotiated, and sediment within the artistic domain.
The circulation of these works under the categories through which museums and curators classify them (generative art, A-Life
generative art, computer-based interactive art) not only articulates specific modes of production and legitimation within the
artistic field, but also reconfigures the notions of art and exhibition that shape visitors' experiences.
These practices reactivate key issues within contemporary artistic production, such as the redefinition of artistic status
(sometimes merging with scientific or political domains) the materiality of the medium, and the increasing relevance of the
exhibition space and visitors' behaviors as constitutive parts of the artwork itself. In this sense, these installations can be
interpreted as sites of visual enregisterment, where recurrent semiotic configurations (technical, aesthetic, and institutional)
acquire social recognition and circulate as collectively shared repertoires of meaning.
Analyzing these works through the articulation of the semiotic notion of domain (which involves practices and value
assignments) and the linguistic–anthropological notion of enregisterment (understood as the sociohistorical process through
which semiotic configurations acquire social recognition and become organized into communicative registers) makes it possible
to highlight not only the stabilization of registers specific to institutions, curators, artists, and visitors (in this case not
necessarily linguistic but behavioral) within contemporary art, but also the specific ways in which they operate “as a block”
within the artistic domain, as opposed to registers that may materialize in similar objects belonging to other social domains. In
this way, it becomes possible to understand how museums, artists, and algorithms configure, legitimize, and stabilize new
forms of enunciation that condense the most radical features of contemporary art.
