During the year of celebration of 50 years of the laboratory, the call "1 Artist / 1 Scientist" allowed 6 projects to see the light. Focus on two of them under the spotlight this September 2026: an exhibition at Le Cube Garges and an article in "Musique Bretonne".
Looking back on a year of festivities
In 2025, IRISA celebrated its 50th anniversary throughout the year, and took the opportunity to relaunch its "1 Artist / 1 Scientist" call. Six projects were selected and unveiled during the closing ceremony on December 11 at INSA Rennes. The principle? Bring IRISA’s research teams into collaboration with artists, in order to bring computer science research and art closer together.
Since then, each of these projects has continued on its own, and two of them have been particularly talked about this month: an exhibition at the Cube Garges for the ERX project, as well as an article in the magazine "Musique Bretonne" for the HeritAIge project.
ERX: the beverage vending machine that decides for you
Born from the meeting between the visual artist Louis Frehring and Erwan Le Merrer, a researcher in the ARTISHAU research team, ERX questions algorithmic decisions. The device is a drink dispenser inhabited by an artificial intelligence that, over questions that may be unrealistic, chooses the drink that suits you best according to your answers. While some imagine AI judges, politicians or recruiters, the artist and the scientist explore the question in an apparently trivial case: to give up one’s free will to a beverage dispenser.
Since its creation, the machine has traveled a lot: to the Champs Libres in Rennes for the 2025 Fête de la Science, to the Musée des Transmissions in Cesson-Sévigné for the exhibition "What is AI?" in May 2026, then at the Nantes Maker Campus of Machines in L'île de Nantes in June 2026. It is now exhibited at the Cube Garges, a digital art center in Garges-lès-Gonesse, near Paris, in the exhibition "D'autres voix. Langage. Code. Traduction" (translation: "Other voices. Language. Code. Translation"), visible from September 26, 2026 to July 17, 2027.
"What a thrill to present ERX alongside the best of contemporary digital art, in this incredible exhibition, at the largest digital art center in France!" said Erwan Le Merrer.
🔹More about ERX:
https://erx-ai.github.io/
HeritAIge: from SKRID to Breton music
Another duo, another field: David Guillemois, singer, composer and interpreter of traditional Breton and Creole-French music, has worked with Virginie Thion (associate professor at ENSSAT) and her doctoral students, Philippe Martin and Adel Aly, from the BARD research team located in Lannion, and Thierry Hau (engineer and cybersecurity teacher).
At the heart of the project is SKRID, the digital library of traditional Breton music scores developed by IRISA.
SKRID was born from the meeting between Virginie Thion, database specialist, and Anne-Marie Nicol, bombarde player, traditional music teacher and member of the magazine for Breton music Dastum. Their idea: a digital library of traditional Breton music scores, based on the latest advances in information retrieval.
His artificial intelligence algorithms, derived from the thesis of Adel Aly and published in international scientific conferences, make it possible to search for a musical motif in collections. The challenge of re-writing: to set a new text to music from these motifs. David Guillemois suggested motifs, the platform sent him back several scores containing them, and he chose one of them, which he reworked to compose an original work, presented in December 2025 at IRISA’s 50th anniversary ceremony.
The project has since been the subject of an article in issue 286 of "Musique Bretonne" (June 2026), a quarterly magazine devoted to current events in Breton music.
The musician David Guillemois testifies: "an original and sensitive creation can emerge from a digital platform," and the experience made him discover "a new process of musical work" which encourages him to continue his research.
🔹Discover the platform:
shaman.enssat.fr/skrid
🔹Read the magazine Musique Bretonne:
https://www.dastum.bzh/recherche-editions/?_collection=revue-musique-bretonne
Collaborations that extend beyond IRISA’s anniversary
From a new exhibition at the Cube Garges digital art center to recognition in the specialized press, these two journeys show that collaboration between art and computer science research opens up new possibilities. It brings together two worlds that rarely meet, offers artistic creation and spreads knowledge in an original and effective way.
🔹Find all the events organized during the 50 years on the page:
https://www.irisa.fr/en/50-years-of-irisa