27 June 2017, a strange ceremony took place in Cologny. Three students from HEAD-Geneva presented the director of the Martin Bodmer Foundation with a very unusual book in the hope that the book might be included in the collection’s catalogue.
This piece—with its mysterious title: Final Faust—was the product of a workshop organised by HEAD-Geneva in collaboration with the Bodmer Lab some months earlier.
Mathilde Buenerd, David Héritier and Nicolas Baldran conceived a generative project that dug up visual fragments (images and text) in multiple editions of Goethe’s Faust from the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, which were then assembled into a wholly computer-guided edition. The final product is a book on paper which re-materialises what digitisation had previously transformed into cloud-stored dated.
Thus, the result is a truly “final” Faust, since the experiment has given itself over to the Faustian temptation of the total aggregation of human writing, in which artificial intelligence, by taking hold of the cultural past, becomes the Mephistopheles of the 21st century.
See a sample: www.chilidesign.fr/projects/ultimatefaust.