Olivain Porry
Artist
May-June 2026
- AI
- New Orleans
“The project aims to highlight the cultural biases of large language models and considers creolization as a process of subverting artificial intelligence technologies.”
From the fan to social networks, technical systems are not neutral tools; they shape our relationship to the world. In this perspective, my artistic practice aims to explore the sociotechnical dimensions of the machines that structure our daily lives, through the subversion of cybernetic devices and computational processes.
My work takes the form of interactive systems connecting machines, audiences, and environments. These are often “collectives of behaving objects”: assemblages of robotic artifacts from which collective behaviors emerge. These forms reveal—and allow the experience of—dynamic, shifting relational modes between objects. They create situations that question notions of object and subject, as well as author and spectator.
Today, as generative artificial intelligences occupy public spaces, natural human language itself incorporates this spectrum of relational modalities between machines. Language becomes algorithmic and is subjected to standardizing logics, which I seek to circumvent through a practice that is both critical and poetic.
Through encounter, exchange, collective writing, and the manipulation of language models, I experiment with creative subversions of these systems: confronting artificial intelligence with processes of creolization to collectively invent poetic and political forms that resist algorithmic uniformity, while opening a space of resonance for marginalized voices and narratives within dominant technical infrastructures—specifically, the minority and heterogeneous languages of Louisiana Creole and Cajun French.
Born in 1990 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Olivain Porry is an artist and holds a SACRe PhD from the EnsadLab laboratory at the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (Université PSL). Trained at the Beaux-Arts de Nantes, he lives and works in Paris, where he is represented by Avant-Galerie Vossen. His work explores, through plastic and cybernetic forms, the sociotechnical issues of contemporary technologies. His doctoral research, “Communities of Machines”, proposes an approach to creation based on negotiation between artists and technical devices. In 2025, he co-founded Les Éditions du Respirateur, an experimental editorial structure dedicated to conceptual forms of publication.
“Synthetic Syncretism” is a project that seeks to interrogate large language models through the lens of creolization processes. It explores, with care and responsibility, what an algorithmic dialect might look like—one born from dialogues between AIs, fed by languages and histories that are often marginalized in digital spaces. The project aims to highlight the cultural biases of large language models and considers creolization as a process of subverting artificial intelligence technologies.
Rooted in field engagement in Louisiana, the project approaches living languages such as Louisiana Creole and Cajun French not as materials to be exploited, but as active cultural forms, rich in subjectivity, resistance, and transmission. Meetings, workshops, and exchanges with native speakers, researchers, and local institutions will help co-construct prompt corpora, conceived as fragments of collective and performative writing. Far from being simple instructions, these prompts are envisioned as literary and social gestures—political and poetic forms capable of influencing AI trajectories and redirecting their dominant logics. The project does not aim to fix a new language or to “preserve” existing ones, but to make visible the tensions, shifts, and emergent forms arising from the sometimes-conflicted contact between computational techniques and living cultures.
The residency will result in a set of experimental devices: publications, artistic installations, and datasets will formalize, in continuity with the residency, collective productions and open spaces where the voices, frictions, and imaginaries encountered can continue to circulate.
Louisiana provides a unique territory for carrying out Synthetic Syncretism, as it embodies linguistic and cultural creolization dynamics that resonate deeply with the project’s objectives. It is one of the few places where multiple languages (English, French, Creoles) have historically coexisted, producing hybrid forms of expression that are sometimes conflictual but always alive. This context allows for a confrontation between the technical imaginaries of artificial intelligences and forms of language that resist standardization.
At a time when large language models tend to flatten the nuances of minority languages, working in Louisiana makes visible what remains at the margins of training corpora. Institutions such as the Center for Louisiana Studies in Lafayette or the Creole Heritage Center in Natchitoches provide valuable resources for accessing archives, meeting engaged researchers, and initiating collaborations on language, history, and memory. Spaces like the Jean Lafitte Cultural Center and media outlets such as Télé-Louisiane also offer essential contemporary grounding for meeting native speakers, collecting stories, and collaboratively creating situated prompts informed by lived experiences.
Moreover, the current research dynamics in AI in Louisiana—with the recent creation of the Louisiana Institute for Artificial Intelligence and projects at Tulane University and the University of New Orleans—open the possibility for productive exchanges between art, science, and technology. It is precisely in this tension between living cultures and computational systems that the project finds its full significance.