Promptograph (n.) — From prompt and -graph. A device that sets in motion, reads, and queries a database materialized as a flow.
The Promptograph — Consumerist Autobiography
For fourteen yearsI meticulously kept every one of my receiptSorted chronologically and assembled into a huge reel, they form the film of a life told through consumption.
This reel constitutes the database of the Promptograph. The Promptograph makes the receipts scroll past, like a succession of fragments of life.
Each receipt is a trace of time, place, and action. Their accumulation reveals habits, changes in life, and, more broadly, an interaction with the transformations of society. The mass of paper makes the weight of our consumption tangible, while the mechanical movement of the reel embodies its continuous rhythm.
The quantity of accumulated data exceeds the scale of human perception. Captured, digitized, and interpreted by artificial intelligence, this data can become readable in new ways: the machine explores what human memory cannot encompass.
The viewer can then prompt this archive and interrogate this data-based biography. The Promptograph becomes a machine for scrolling, analyzing, and narrating a life through its traces of consumption and the instructions given to artificial intelligence.
The interface used to prompt the receipts was developed by Progedoca company specializing since 2004 in the digitization, management, and artificial intelligence and document retrieval made it possible to transform this archive of receipts into a searchable database.
Learn more about Progedoc:
https://www.progedoc.fr/
An autobiography without a narrative, in which receipts become memory, data becomes portrait, and scrolling becomes a journey through time.
The structure of the Promptograph was created with the support ofatelier REHAB, whose mission is to give plastic a second life by transforming it into a durable, aesthetic, and accessible materialThe structure of the Promptograph, like all the panels produced by REHAB, was handcrafted in their workshop in Concarneau, France.
The approach and values of REHAB resonate with one of the central ambitions of the artwork: to question the environmental impact of our consumption choices. The material from which the machine itself is made thus becomes an integral part of this reflection on consumption, materials, and their future.
Learn more about REHAB:
https://www.atelier-rehab.com/
