ALREADYMADE n° 1 : Trying hard to get into the big game (2024)

Digital print on tarpaulin – 120 x 200 cm.

This work began with a simple instruction submitted to an artificial intelligence image generator: “Sculpture of a chromed Mercedes-Benz wheelbarrow filled with breeze blocks on a pedestal.” The resulting image, entirely synthesized by the machine, forms the basis of this printed work. By choosing to reproduce the AI-generated rendering as a large-format print on tarpaulin, the piece explores the tension between imagined object and visual simulation, between material absence and conceptual presence.

Rather than realizing the image as a physical sculpture, the decision to fix it in two-dimensional form reinforces the ambiguity at the heart of the ready-made tradition. In this sense, the work does not present the sculpture itself, but its ghost—its speculative form, its virtual double. This gesture extends the Duchampian strategy of displacement by replacing the object with its mediated representation, and by inserting a layer of technological abstraction into the process of creation.

ALREADYMADE n°1 positions itself as both homage and critique. It revisits the legacy of Marcel Duchamp—not only through the appropriation of banal subject matter and the notion of the found object, but also through the strategic play with authorship, designation, and artifice. The “ready-made” here is not selected but generated. The signature move is replaced by the prompt, the gesture by an algorithm, the atelier by the dataset.

The print itself becomes an object of reflection: a surface that encapsulates the aesthetics of automation, the flattening of cultural memory through AI, and the displacement of labor from the artist’s hand to the machine’s output. The use of tarpaulin—a material often associated with advertising, construction, or the vernacular—echoes the work’s interest in the collision between high art and everyday infrastructure.

This project ultimately raises questions about the conditions of image-making today: What does it mean to create a work that exists only as a suggestion of form? What is the role of the artist in an age where visual production can be outsourced to machines? And can the Duchampian act of selection survive when the field of possible images is no longer physical, but algorithmic?

By foregrounding these tensions, ALREADYMADE n°1 proposes a new kind of ready-made—one that exists not as object, but as instruction, hallucination, and print.