[Fall 2025]
Le jour où j’ai tué mon frère
by Christelle Proulx
Marcillac-Vallon, Lamaindonne, 2025, 96 pages
[EXCERPT]
In this short book, Serge Tisseron reflects on memory, photography, and the generation of images by artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including an anecdote in which he remembers his own past. Tisseron, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, has already published copiously on visual culture, including comic books and film, and on digital technologies.
Le jour où j’ai tué mon frère is based on a personal experience: while flipping through an album of photographs taken by his father when he was a child, he realized that an image in which he appeared with his brother was missing. He tried to reproduce the picture as he remembered it, first by sketching it and then by using various AI image-generation platforms. Each iteration was unsatisfactory until colleagues told him about Midjourney. Finally, he made an image that seemed to correspond fully to what he had remembered as he searched for the real photograph from 1957. Realizing that his new images differed in numerous ways, he wondered about the causes of these discrepancies.
In keeping with his psychoanalytic approach, Tisseron wonders about imagination, memory, and the true image, all key to the coexistence of contradictory states that underlie the concepts of the conscious and the unconscious. Such a coexistence, he posits, can be conveyed in the field of image-generation possibilities. The photograph that exists only as a memory, then, serves as a metaphor for the contradictions of AI – a false image of something that once existed, a hyper-realistic image that materializes something that never happened – combining a fascination with and repulsion for these tools’ efficiency and persistent uncanniness. The issues of reality and fiction that inhabit the images AI produces extend beyond a simple opposition; they are also necessarily traversed by the spectrum between transparency and opacity, as well as that between objectivity and subjectivity.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 130 – PLANTS AND GARDENS ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Le jour où j’ai tué mon frère ]
Christelle Proulx is a researcher, university lecturer, and exhibition curator. She completed a doctorate in 2022 for which she focused on the connections among various web algorithms, their ideologies, and how they shape visual culture. Her research expertise covers photography, contemporary art, sociological, feminist, and queer approaches to science and technology, particularly artificial intelligence.