Ballet Mécanique Series (2018 - 2022)
The series takes the 1924 experimental film Ballet Méchanique by artist Fernand Léger and filmmaker Dudley Murphy as its starting point to develop works that address the technology of AI and the invisible and recursive figure of the automaton after dada and surrealism. This early dadaist work produced a psychological meditation on mechanised technology in the wake of the First World War, an early realization of the uncanny dimensions of an increasingly industrialised Europe. After deconstructing this film into sequential frames, Frid-Jimenez uses these images to “train” an artificial neural network, or AI, which then produces a new composite film automatically.
A selection of art works from the Ballet Mecanique series has been exhibited as part of zero, ground curated by Lee Plested at Griffin Art Projects in Vancouver in 2018, which included art works by Tacita Dean, Tara Donovan, Stan Douglas, Amber Frid-Jimenez, Rodney Graham, Antonia Hirsch, Denzil Hurley, Philipp Lachenmann, Myfanwy MacLeod, Damian Moppett, Bettina Pousttchi, Kathy Slade, Beate Terfloth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.
In 2022, Vancouver Art Gallery acquired her 16 minute video object entitled Apres Ballet Mecanique and exhibited the art work as part of The Imitation Game curated by Bruce Grenville and Glenn Entis.