CONFESSIO

Benoit Challand — 2026

AI as the
new religion

Generative interactive installation

CONFESSIO is the second chapter of La Vorace, the series in which Benoit Challand builds a visual language of emotion, where every geometric parameter of a form answers to an affective component of speech. The project extends the exhibition held in Paris last March, which showed the first sculptures born of this system. This second stage goes further: it places the viewer at the heart of the process and lets them bring their own Vorace into being.

The process

It all begins with speech. The visitor says aloud a confession, a secret, a memory charged with emotion.

The text is read against precise criteria: the intensity and polarity of the emotion, how secret the thing confided is, the sharpness of the memory, the people and objects it evokes. It is then passed to an artificial intelligence. The machine does not act freely: it follows rules set by the artist, which frame and steer its response. The confession is broken down into seven parameters, each scored from 0 to 100, and becomes a form generated in real time. That form belongs to the person who spoke and can never be reproduced identically. Each Vorace gives a singular vision of secrecy and emotion.

The Confessio cube lit from above in a dark room, a silhouette visible through the polycarbonate

The physical installation

Confessio — 2 × 2 m cube

01 / 05

The cube

The installation takes the most intimate form of religious rite, the confessional, and entrusts it to a machine. At the centre of a 2 × 2 m cube of aluminium and semi-transparent polycarbonate panels stands a totem the visitor addresses. The structure never shows everything: a silhouette, a glow, a movement can be made out, but never the face or the words of the person speaking. Intimacy is protected by the very material of the installation.

The polycarbonate cube installed in the gallery, a figure seated inside

02 / 05

From priest to machine

Not so long ago, we went to church to confess. Today, we confide in artificial intelligences. CONFESSIO questions this passage from priest to machine, from absolution to data. AI inherits the attributes of the sacred: it listens without judging, it is always available, it promises a form of understanding.

The totem inside the cube: a black branching form carrying a screen

03 / 05

What remains

But it does not forgive: it records, analyses and returns. The work makes that operation visible by giving it a body. The secret disappears, only the form remains: a geometry whose content the visitor can no longer read, but whose silhouette they recognise as their own.

Gallery interior with Vorace sculptures on a table and a mantelpiece

04 / 05

The sculpture

For every viewer who wishes it, the generated Vorace gives rise to a physical sculpture, made by the artist. The confession leaves the screen to become an object held in the hand. Mute to anyone who does not know its origin, it weaves an intimate, almost secret bond with the person who brought it into being: they alone know what the form contains.

Detail of a black Vorace sculpture on a wooden plinth
A Vorace on a black pedestal, the street visible through the gallery window
Vorace sculptures lined up in the gallery window, facing the street

05 / 05

The ex-voto

To seal the confession, the sculpture then gives rise to an ex-voto inscribed on the blockchain as an NFT: a certified trace of what was said without ever being read.