In Better Mont-Blanc, Jacques Perconte explores the visual effects and theoretical implications of one of the operations performed by generative AI models: upscaling, or increasing the resolution of digital images. The work is based on historical and contemporary images photographed and filmed around Mont Blanc, the lignite mines of Hambach, foundries, and nuclear power plants in France. The melting of Alpine glaciers is juxtaposed here with infrastructure and techniques for extracting and exploiting terrestrial resources, recalling human activities' expansion, interconnection and standardisation. The work mediates the tension between the irreducible richness of sensory experience and the statistical approximation of AI-generated images. It questions our relationship to progress, effort and the desire to appropriate a world that is disappearing before our eyes.
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