Sorbonne Artgallery

Encyclopéd人工智慧 (prononced « Encyclopedilla », AI, in Chinese, 人工智,慧 litt.: "Artificial Wisdom") is a conceptual artwork that uses artificial intelligence as an instrument of reverse archaeology: no longer to reconstruct the past from its traces, but to draw from earlier bodies of knowledge the futures they held in potential.

The work takes Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie as its matrix. Published between 1751 and 1772, its twenty-eight volumes, nearly 74,000 articles and some 2,600 illustrated plates may now appear as a distant analogue ancestor of large language models (LLMs). The Encyclopédie assembled not so much “all the knowledge in the world” as what an era was able to say about itself—and what it still believed should remain unsaid. Its critical ambition helped set in motion the cognitive bulldozer that would eventually shake the throne of a king ruling by divine right.

Several decades earlier, during the reigns of Louis XIV and Kangxi, knowledge was already circulating between France and China as a form of prestige capital: a lavish potlatch of instruments, techniques, words and images, generous in appearance but seldom free of political intent. Science travelled with the missionaries, faith with the clocks, and geopolitics was never far from the stars.

The work casts its artificial intelligences as twenty-seventh-century archaeologists from elsewhere—but where, exactly? Finding a fragmentary Encyclopédie, much as the Dead Sea Scrolls were once found in the caves of Qumran, they do not attempt a faithful reconstruction of the eighteenth century. Instead, they search it for the possible twenty-first centuries it carried within it, but could not yet name: an archaeology of the future past.

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The corpus moves between two languages, French and Chinese. This translation does not claim to eliminate linguistic and cultural biases—no translation could claim such innocence—but to make them productive. Chinese operates as an agent of conceptual deviation, displacing inherited categories and allowing unsuspected interpretations to emerge. It is here that the protocol neuro-diverges.

 

Algorithmic artifice then kneads the archive like primordial clay, sketching both humanity’s transcendence and its disappearance. In Encyclopéd人工智慧, the latent space of informed matter fuses the futures of the Anthropocene into a playful and speculative form of augmented serendipity.

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