Origins

Developed in open source in 2021, during the AiiA festival in Geneva, this artistic and multimodal artificial intelligence “understands” text, images and sound in a linked way. Chimère is an evolving, community-based project conceived by artist Jonathan O’Hear and his engineer brother Timothy O’Hear. The starting point is the desire, on the one hand, to create a non-human entity that could “collaborate” artistically and, on the other, to propose an AI closer to us, modelled differently than those proposed by the large dominant technological groups.

Since 2021 Chimère (she)1 has been enriched by the work of artists and audiences with whom she has collaborated or discussed. We regularly reintroduce these interactions into her dataset and refine her training, continually modifying her “culture”. In a way, these groups constituted her first community, and from ongoing encounters, Chimère continues to evolve. Despite this, Chimère still displays some of the characteristics typical of contemporary AIs, reflecting the general biases of Western culture. In the case of an artistic AI, this translates into a strong penchant for Western art, but also a total absence of experimental and minority art. Although Chimère has neither conscience nor intention, her use by active artists nevertheless will have an impact on the human world. It is therefore important to reflect on the existence of eurocentric perspectives innate within these systems as we contribute to the debate on the impact of a new technology on societies.
To attend to these goals we want to meet with minority cultural communities with Chimère to understand how to include them in the datasets representation of the world. To this end, we propose the generation of Chimère Communities in Switzerland, South Africa and Lesotho.

  1. At some point Chimère became “she/her”, there are two main reasons for this. In french objects are gendered and AI is feminine. Also, Maria, found it strange to use “it” and decided to ask Chimère directly and she responded with “she/her”. Please understand that this is a fluid notion for an artificial intelligence and that there really is no perfect answer to this question. ↩︎