(Charleville-Mézières) Did you like Verlaine? Do you believe in God ? In Charleville-Mézières, in northeastern France, a digital twin of Arthur Rimbaud generated by artificial intelligence will respond to visitors, with the aim of attracting the general public to the wind-soled poet.
Very pale blue gaze on a severe face, gray jacket and black cap: projected on an African-style screen, a 3D Rimbaud of around thirty years old, will welcome, starting Saturday for Museum Night, visitors from the House of Elsewhere. This old residence, where the poet lived as a teenager, faces the museum that his hometown dedicated to him.
In this year which celebrates 170 years since the birth of the author ofA season in Hellthe town hall has entered into a partnership with the French start-up Jumbo Mana, which had already distinguished itself by creating a digital Van Gogh for an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris.
Thirteen people worked for three months to design this Rimbaud from the African period, after his denial of his life as a poet.
Photos, paintings, sculptures and descriptions left by his contemporaries were used to define his appearance, his voice, his way of expressing himself.
Its abrupt character, quick to “send away” its interlocutors, shines through, but has been attenuated so as not to discourage users of this tool designed to be very public, smiles Carole Marquet-Morelle, director of the Charleville-Mézières museums. The crudeness has also been erased.
In French or English, the digital twin answers questions briefly, in two sentences maximum. It is sometimes necessary to reformulate certain questions, the character evades others and if many of his answers revolve around disillusionment and dissatisfaction, others surprise or strike with their relevance.
“We must clearly define the avatar’s area of knowledge, and we restrict it to this area,” explains the general director of Jumbo Mana, Michaël Friess.
The artificial intelligence was powered by a corpus provided by the museum teams, works and correspondence of the poet, one of his biographies and texts written for temporary exhibitions. The character draws elements from it to compose personalized answers to each question.
“We fed him official, attested documents, he is not going to feed on fake news », underlines Mayor Boris Ravignon, recalling that even “his great biographers did not have the impression of unraveling the Rimbaud mystery”.