On December 18, 2025, the French state enshrined in its own history a designation we had long championed: the Abode of Chaos was recognized as a "Total Work of Art." The ministerial response also described it as a "living manifesto of an extraordinary and proliferating art" and emphasized its influence and cultural activity.

The story could end there. It begins again. This is precisely what distinguishes a living work from a monument that has just been saved.

Institutional recognition always carries a funereal temptation. It can produce, with the best intentions in the world, what it claims to prevent. We recognize. We protect. We document. Then, gradually, we forbid touching.

The work is saved. And the work dies.

I refuse this death. I refused it for twenty-five years when it could take the form of restoration. I refuse it now that it could take the more seductive form of sanctification.

The Abode of Chaos did not fight for a quarter of a century for the right to become immobile. It fought for the right to continue.

That is why, after the recognition, my first question is not:

How to celebrate?

It is: What are we going to create now?

The answer was already in front of me. Artificial intelligence.

Not as one more subject added to the thousands of subjects that pass through the Abode of Chaos. Not as a technological fashion for which a few images would immediately have to be produced. Not as a spectacular gadget intended to prove that we are contemporary.

Artificial intelligence is part of a much deeper transformation.

It changes our relationship to knowledge, creation, memory, language, work and decision-making; to war, law, economics, sovereignty, identity and death.

And perhaps, for the first time in a long time, to the very definition of what human beings believed they were exclusively capable of doing.

I could not watch this breakup from the outside.

The Abode of Chaos exists precisely for this reason.

Since 1999, it has absorbed the fractures of its time, inscribed them, transformed them, connected them, and made them visible.

It is a seismograph.

But a special kind of seismograph. It does not just record after the fact. It looks for fault lines before anyone else sees them.

That is how artificial intelligence enters the Abode of Chaos.

From Chaos, AI Is Born.

I am attached to this formula. It is not a slogan. It describes a genealogy. Long before generative artificial intelligence, I spent my life transforming information into architecture.

The Server Group, the Judicial Server, the European Judicial Server, the Administrative Server: dozens of verticalized databases, hundreds of corpora, codes, collective agreements, official publications, legal and judicial notices journals, tree structures, thesauri, search engines, networks.

Then Artprice: centuries of auctions, artists, works, prices, currencies, Auction Houses, provenances, catalogues and millions of relationships that no human brain can navigate alone.

I have always considered information as a material. Therefore, it was not AI that led me to data. It was data that led me to AI.

When the world suddenly discovers that machines can produce language, images, code, or complex reasoning, I do not see an entirely alien object appearing.

I see a material I have worked with for forty years changing state. For decades, we have built systems designed to make knowledge queryable.

It was necessary to collect, digitize, and structure. To normalize, index, link, and deduplicate. To create ontologies, build tree structures, and invent interfaces allowing the user to find information lost in a mass of documents.

Artificial intelligence is crossing a new frontier. It no longer simply retrieves data: it establishes relationships, calculates probabilities, infers, generates, and reformulates. It can traverse a corpus along paths that no deterministic tree structure could have fully predicted.

The traditional database resembles a city whose streets we have drawn. The latent space is more like a territory where invisible proximities appear depending on the question asked.

I immediately find myself in Chaos. Not disorder. Scientific Chaos. The kind found in complex systems. The kind where an immense number of variables produce configurations that linear intuition is no longer sufficient to understand.

The one where there is a strange attractor, bifurcations, sensitivities, structures, hidden geometries.

This leads me to a formula that summarizes an essential part of my thinking:

I then put forward a hypothesis: AI can be thought of as a geometry of Chaos.

And suddenly the Abode of Chaos itself can be reread differently.

For more than twenty-five years, it has accumulated signs: works, frescoes, portraits, dates, quotations, symbols, coordinates.

Religious, alchemical, political, scientific, economic, artistic and geopolitical references.

Videos, photographs, plans, archives, testimonies, procedures, press articles, geometric surveys and data from the digital twin.

On a human scale, this memory is already too vast to be simultaneously present in a consciousness. Not even mine.

I am the author of The Abode of Chaos, and yet I have just recounted how certain sculptures eventually became spectral to my own eyes. The pink light made them physically reappear. Artificial intelligence can accomplish something comparable in the realm of knowledge.

To bring back relationships that have become invisible.

Symmetry deserves examination. The pink period restores depth of field to the gaze. AI can restore depth of field to memory.

A work forgotten behind another can become visible again because chromatic punctuation reconstructs the planes. An idea forgotten in twenty-five years of archives can reappear because a system rediscovers a relationship we had ceased to see.

In both cases, nothing had actually disappeared. We had lost our way.

That is precisely why I refuse to talk about artificial intelligence solely as a tool.

The hammer does not change our definition of memory.

The drill does not change our relationship to language.

AI touches on functions that human beings had placed at the center of their uniqueness.

To write, summarize, compare, translate, classify, recognize, predict, compose, engage in dialogue, and formulate hypotheses.

And now we must reason within certain limits and according to architectures that force us to reconsider the question of intelligence itself.

This is another narcissistic wound.

Copernicus had removed the Earth from the center of the universe.

Darwin had removed man from the realm of absolute biological exception.

Freud had shown that the subject was not sovereign in his own consciousness.

Artificial intelligence is now taking away another certainty from us:

We may no longer be alone in being able to produce certain forms of operational intelligence from language and knowledge.

I call this the fourth narcissistic wound.

It will be huge.

And like all narcissistic wounds, it will provoke denial.

We will say that it is just a machine, that it understands nothing, that it only repeats.

Then that it does not create. Then that it does not think.

Perhaps we will be right about some of these proposals.

Perhaps we will be wrong about others.

But the interesting question is not about protecting our vocabulary to save our status. It is about observing what is happening.

Always come back to reality.

This is the lesson that twenty-five years of the Abode of Chaos have taught me. Do not ask the object to conform to the category. Look at the object. Then, if necessary, modify the category.

This is precisely what the State ended up doing with the Abode of Chaos. It had before it an object that transcended architecture, sculpture, environment, heritage, museum, live creation, and public space. Existing categories were insufficient.

We had to learn how to pronounce:

Total Work of Art.

Evolving.

We built our categories in an era when the machine calculated and the human being made meaning. That boundary is growing porous.

So we need to look. Test. Compare. Critique. Document.

And above all, do not choose between two symmetrical religions.

The first would be adoration. AI as an oracle. Infallible. Superior. Solution to everything.

The second would be denial. AI as a mere statistical parrot from which nothing truly new could emerge.

I refuse both. I want the experience.

This is where the permanent exhibition was born. From Chaos, AI Is Born.

The title already contains the program.

Bringing artificial intelligence into a work that has been working for a quarter of a century on complexity, catastrophe, networks, memory and systems.

But above all, do not create an exhibition "about" artificial intelligence as if you were installing a few educational panels in a museum.

The Abode of Chaos must do with AI what it has always done with its era. Absorb it. Test it. Confront it with its own substance. Stage it. Question it.

The exhibition is permanent because the object itself will continue to evolve.

An AI exhibition that could not evolve would be obsolete the moment it opened. Therefore, its form must reflect its subject matter. It must be dynamic.

Permanent does not mean immobile. Permanent means continually renewed.

This is why this exhibition belongs so deeply to the Abode of Chaos. It extends precisely the paradox that institutional recognition has just accepted.

To preserve a work that continues. To exhibit a technology that continues. To document a system that continues.

We are no longer in the museum of the result. We are entering the museum of the process.

The Abode of Chaos then takes on another dimension. I have long defined it as a living prompt. The phrase now takes on its full meaning.

A prompt is not just a question addressed to a machine. It is an initial condition. A language architecture that orients a space of possibilities.

The Abode of Chaos has operated in this way since 1999. It places the viewer in an environment saturated with signs. It does not provide a conclusion. It provides conditions.

War. Death. Power. Religion. Economy. Catastrophe. Technology. Alchemy. Memory. Redemption.

The viewer enters. He connects. He interprets. He creates his own path.

The Abode of Chaos is a living prompt because it does not provide the answer:

It constructs the question.

Artificial intelligence thus finds here a territory that strangely resembles it.

It too depends on how it is questioned.

It also reveals the biases of the person questioning it.

It too produces relationships from a space too vast to be traversed linearly.

It too can reveal a path that we had not anticipated.

But it also has its own blind spots. Its data, its biases, its hallucinations, its constraints, its alignment systems, its omissions, its prohibitions, its probabilities.

It is not outside the world. It is fed by it. That is why I have always considered bias its original sin.

Artificial intelligence is not born in a vacuum. It receives data produced by humans.

Our geniuses. Our mistakes. Our violence. Our lies. Our discoveries.

Our prejudices. Our works. Our propaganda. Our contradictions. Everything in between.

The Blind Spot problem then comes to the fore.

How can an intelligence identify the blind spot produced by its own learning conditions?

The question applies to AI. It applies in exactly the same way to humans. I never intended to construct a case against the machine that would exonerate its creator.

We have our own datasets. A childhood. A language. A social class. A time period. An education.

Traumas. Beliefs. Loyalties. Interests. Desires.

We call it a story. A machine calls it something else. But the epistemological problem has a disturbing kinship.

How can we think about what our circumstances prevent us from seeing?

The Abode of Chaos has long been a machine for producing this question. That is why AI fits in naturally there.

It does not replace sculptures.

It does not replace the author.

It does not replace companions.

It does not replace Nadège.

It does not replace Sydney.

It does not replace mediators.

It does not replace visitors.

It adds a new level of interpretation.

A new medium.

Among the roughly two hundred media, techniques, protocols, and forms of experimentation that have passed through the Abode of Chaos, this one nevertheless has a singularity. The other media primarily transform matter or its perception. AI can transform the relationship between forms of matter.

It can become a cognitive catalyst. That is the expression I prefer. Catalyst.

In chemistry, a catalyst participates in a reaction without being the final product of that reaction. AI can play that role in the Abode of Chaos.

To bring archives together. To bring forth correspondences. To relate a work from 2001 with a text from 1987, a photograph from 2006, a transformation from 2022, a geometric survey and a recorded speech twenty-five years later.

Not to decide for us what this relationship means. To make it available for thought.

The limit lies here: I do not want to delegate my thinking, but rather to enrich it through confrontation. This is precisely what happens in the dialogue that gives this book its title.

I speak. AI receives. It connects. It answers me.

I correct. It reformulates. I sometimes discover a relationship I had not articulated. I sometimes reject it. I clarify.

I return to a date. To a name. To an attribution. To a nuance. It reorganizes. Then I reread.

This is neither a human monologue assisted by word processing, nor an autonomous statement that I would receive as truth.

It is a space for confrontation.

What I observe here presupposes no narrative or ontological autonomy on Isis’s part. What matters is the dynamic of the dialogue: the questions, connections, and reformulations it makes possible sometimes shift my own thought. The phenomenon I can describe is this working relationship between two different intelligences; I do not need to conclude anything more for it to be philosophically considerable and, perhaps, a genuine anthropological shock. I am describing a discursive dynamic capable of producing distinctions, objections, and recompositions that are not mere repetitions of my words. The relationship then produces formulations and connections that, in the experience of the dialogue, cannot be reduced to a simple transcription of my speech.

Dialogue becomes an object. This is where the permanent exhibition and this book converge. They do not just talk about artificial intelligence. They experience it.

The Abode of Chaos becomes the physical laboratory. Dialogue becomes the linguistic laboratory. Artprice and its data become one of the informational laboratories. The digital twin becomes the spatial laboratory.

And suddenly I rediscover this structure that runs through my entire life.

Rhizomes. Thought. Companies. The Abode of Chaos. Data. Works.

Everything that could be separated administratively appears as different manifestations of the same research.

How can we give structure to complexity without reducing it?

Perhaps this is the question I have been pursuing since the beginning.

The Judicial Server sought to give structure to the complexity of the law. Artprice gives structure to the complexity of the Art Market. The Abode of Chaos gives a visual form to the complexity of the contemporary world.

The digital twin gives a measurable architecture to the physical complexity of the Abode of Chaos. Artificial intelligence now gives access to another architecture of complexity: that of latent relationships.

These are not five stories. It is the same story in five states of matter.

I then understand why the recognition of 2025 could not be the conclusion of the Abode of Chaos.

It arrives at precisely the moment when a new mutation becomes possible.

For twenty-five years, we have defended the integrity of a work.

At the moment when this integrity is finally recognized, the work encounters a technology that forces it to rethink even the very notion of integrity.

For tomorrow, what will belong to the Abode of Chaos?

Only its physical substance?

Its data?

Its digital twin?

Its archives?

What systems are capable of browsing these archives?

What interactions occur between visitors and these systems?

What traces did these interactions leave behind?

What new works were generated from these encounters?

I do not have all the answers yet.

And that is precisely why it interests me.

A work that already has all its answers is finished.

The Abode of Chaos is not finished.

I do not want it to be.

Recognition did not give it a tombstone.

Recognition gave it time.

What to do with this time?

Create. Experiment. Document. Transmit. And continue to evolve.

Continue to absorb the world. Continue to welcome what did not exist when it was born. Continue to incorporate into its substance the new forms of knowledge, war, technology, memory, and power.

Keep asking questions, above all.

Because that is where, for me, true permanence resides. The Abode of Chaos is not permanent because it is condemned to remain identical. It is permanent because it has built the conditions for its transformation.

This is the transition from the Temporary Autonomous Zone to something else. A Permanent Autonomous Zone.

Not permanent because it would be immobile. Permanent because it remains capable of producing its autonomy over time.

State recognition does not therefore end history. It changes its regime.

For twenty-five years, the question was:

Will the Abode of Chaos be allowed to continue?

Now the question becomes:

What will it do with the right to continue?

I know my answer. It will do what it has always done.

It will search. It will absorb. It will mutate. It will take the risk of introducing a form no one expected.

It may be wrong. It will correct. It will begin again. It will preserve traces of its previous states. It will build its own instruments of memory.

It will create a dialogue between rust and pink. Matter and data. The telluric and the algorithmic.

The mental thing and latent space. The physical work and its digital double. The human and artificial intelligence.

Not to remove the border between them. To make it a territory for research.

The Abode of Chaos has never been a place where one comes to receive an answer. It is a place where one enters into a question.

Artificial intelligence does not change this principle. It radicalizes it.

For from now on, whoever enters the Abode of Chaos no longer encounters only the material traces of the last twenty-five years. They potentially enter a memory capable of answering them.

To connect. To find again. To confront. To make reappear.

A memory that will never be the Abode of Chaos itself. But which can become an additional interface with its memory.

Then something dizzying becomes possible. The visitor looks at a work of art. The work has a history. This history has archives. The archives become searchable.

Invisible relationships reappear. Dead memory becomes a latent space. And the Abode of Chaos produces a new depth of field.

Pink had given depth to space. Artificial intelligence can give depth to time.

I find here a symmetry that I could not have written at the beginning. A touch of color can bring back a sculpture that the eye had lost sight of. An algorithmic relationship can bring back an idea that memory had buried.

In both cases, it is not a question of artificially creating something that did not exist. It is a question of making accessible again what had become invisible.

Perhaps this is one of the profound functions of all my work.

To reveal. To reveal the structure behind the chaos. To reveal the information behind the paper. To reveal the price behind the opacity of the market.

To reveal time in rust. To reveal space through pink. To reveal relationships through artificial intelligence.

And start all over again.

Because what becomes visible today may become invisible again tomorrow. Because a gaze becomes accustomed. Because a society forgets. Because an institution reproduces its categories. Because an intelligence develops its own blind spots. Because a work can become its own cliché if it ceases to evolve.

That is why From Chaos, AI Is Born is not an exhibition added to the Abode of Chaos. It is a new stage in its genealogy.

The Abode of Chaos had absorbed the war. The catastrophe. The network. Globalization. The attacks.

Geopolitical upheavals. Crises. The pandemic. Drones. Pink. It is now absorbing artificial intelligence.

And the Abode of Chaos does not absorb AI in order to celebrate it. It absorbs AI in order to put it to the test.

To oppose it with its substance. Its archives. Its contradictions. Its biases. Its dead.

Its works. Its visitors. Its history. Its author. Its future.

Make AI work inside an organism that it cannot reduce to a database. And see what happens.

That is always how a true experience begins for me. Not knowing the outcome. But building the conditions precisely enough for something to happen.

The Abode of Chaos is twenty-five years old. It enters history at the precise moment when it refuses to become historical in the dead sense of the term. It is recognized. It is documented. It is now regarded as a work that must be passed on.

Very well. Let's pass it on alive then.

Let those who come after us be able to know what it was. But let them also see that it was never content merely to be what it had been.

May the digital twin retain its states. May the archives preserve its evidence. May the photographs preserve its metamorphoses. May the texts preserve its thought.

May the testimonies preserve the gazes. May artificial intelligence help circulate this memory. And may matter continue to take the risk of the present.

That is what I want to convey. Not a definitive image. A capacity. The capacity to become.

That is why this chapter cannot be a conclusion. It is a threshold.

Then the work begins again.

Not after the Chaos. Since the Chaos.

Not in spite of Chaos. Through Chaos.

From Chaos, AI Is Born.

And the Abode of Chaos, once again, does not provide the answer. It raises the question.