Childhood, on my mother’s lap, I watched the bright stars against the indigo background of the Mediterranean sky. The Milky Way, Libra and the Great Bear were the stars…

My mother fed my curiosity with legends about the constellations. What struck me most was the “background” of the sky, elusive and undefinable… that distant, deep, intriguing indigo vault. It was the beginning of my great existential questions.

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After the baccalauréat, I was first drawn to mechanics. My interest in it sprang from the dream of perpetual motion… But I soon enrolled at the School of Fine Arts.

Gradually, science, play and art formed a unity in my mind. How do we apprehend our fleeting existence in an invisible and impenetrable universe?

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What eludes me interests me. I know that human beings always lack the elements needed to understand the mystery of the universe. As for my personal struggle, I know it is lost from the start.

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We remember Gilgamesh, who set out in search of immortality. He acquires the secret from his ancestor Uta-Napishtim in the form of the plant of life. The plant is lost, stolen and eaten by the Serpent during the hero’s journey, even before he returns to his people.

It will be a long time before humans become immortal as the Sumerian once dreamed! But how can we fail to see that all science is ultimately occupied by this almost unspoken objective: to push back death indefinitely, to become immortal and equal to the gods?

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The installation “Between Sky and Earth” combines three elements:

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A robot, preprogrammed, which moves randomly over a carpet on which the earth is depicted.

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A pole mounted on this robot springs into the air and passes through a mobile — a kind of celestial veil of the twelve constellations that turns perpetually.

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Twelve panels represent the signs of the zodiac. Each sign is paired with the portrait of a remarkable person and a quotation from them. Human life is too short, full of a thousand unanswered questions, yet transcended by exceptional individuals who make it into a “work.” The backgrounds of the panels are worked in a range of indigo: from sky blue through vibrant indigo to a deep indigo almost black — black like the sky my childhood gaze tried to pierce as far as possible before I fell asleep on my mother’s lap…

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Nasser Soumi

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Credits

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The Robot was created with Mehdi Kamashi and Steve Nguyen, researchers in artificial intelligence and bio-inspired robotics. In counterpoint to current trends and fashions around artificial intelligence, they aimed to make a robot as imperfect as possible, yet beautiful in its quest and perseverance. A robot that tries, that makes mistakes, that hesitates, that changes its mind, that backtracks. In short, a robot that searches, that seeks its path and seems to search for itself. As long as society turns men into robots, we will strive to make robots into men.