Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Clichés

In the infamous "Fuck You” monologue from “25th Hour”, Edward Norton lashes out into a racist, frenzied, venomous rant at New York City and its inhabitants. Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion updated the scene to the age of automation, data mania and easy generalisation with the help of popularity algorithms.  Their online generative movie dynamically links images from Google or Bing searches to the audio excerpt from the film. Each keyword is translated in real time into brutal visual stereotypes that rebuff cultural diversity and echo the list of trite insults the actor spits out in Spike Lee’s movie. The set of images change at each viewing, according to the variation of the most popular images and the prejudices that human beings inject -often unconsciously- into algorithms.

shortlist net based 2017