Patrick Bérubé Puts an AI-Generated Forest Next to Real Mycelium

Plein Sud Presents Et ainsi de suite… (And So On…) in Longueuil

Plein Sud presents Et ainsi de suite… (And So On…) by Patrick Bérubé, through December 20, 2026.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is an AI-generated tracking shot through a forest, played on a large translucent metallic LED screen that hangs in the middle of the room.

Sculptures of mycelium and copper, an engraved acrylic panel and 3D-printed elements share the space with it, all on a green carpet. Below, the exhibition text explains what that green floor has to do with a film set.

Exhibition Text, Courtesy of Plein Sud

The exhibition Et ainsi de suite… (And So On…), the third and final part of the Echo/System trilogy, extends several of the inquiries and reflections initiated in the first two parts (presented at Kamouraska Art Center in 2024 and the Joliette Art Museum in 2026).

While the earlier parts offered spaces for slowing down, listening, and reconnecting with the living world, the past, and the present, this third exhibition unfolds as a projection into the future, a meditation on the possible futures of the world and of matter. Materials such as mycelium and copper serve as metaphors for memory and the invisible networks connecting all forms of life.

If the previous shows sought to relearn how to inhabit our environment and reconnect with sensory experience and presence in the world, this new installation views the present as a stratum of geological time, a fragment embedded in a broader continuity where evolution, memory, and transformation intertwine.

Layered sculptures of copper and mycelium thus emerge as witnesses to this world in transition.

An AI-generated video, depicting a tracking shot through a forest and displayed on a massive, translucent metallic LED screen, powerfully highlights the boundaries between the real and the virtual.

On the floor, a green carpet evokes grass and natural landscapes, but also the "green screens" used in cinema and photography for compositing computer-generated imagery.

This setup opens up a space for reflection on concepts and beliefs regarding figure and ground, simulation, and perception, echoing the new virtual realities that are progressively redefining our experience of the world.

At once organic and technological, the works examine how networks - natural, digital, and social - reconfigure our relationship with the ecosystem, time, and memory.

Echoing these systems, this final chapter of the trilogy invites us to imagine, speculate, and anticipate, not through a linear logic of progress, but through a cyclical and fluid vision of time, where the future is rooted in the past and the present, constantly regenerating through contact with the forces of the living world.