This is his third book on artificial intelligence published in two years. The British-American conceptual artist Phillip Toledano, born in London in 1968 but living and working in New York, has spent nearly a decade representing the world inhabited by those who believe in alternative truths or facts—a project titled The United States of Conspiracies.
The arrival of mass artificial intelligence has provided him with a golden tool. With the series “We Are at War” in 2024, he visually resurrected the Normandy Landings on the occasion of its 80th anniversary, recreating through AI the images that Robert Capa would have, according to legend, taken on Omaha Beach and whose negatives were subsequently lost.
That same year, Phillip Toledano depicted American scenes that were as strange as they were unsettling in the book Another America. To increase the images’ verisimilitude, he recreated the photographic style of the 1940s and 1950s. Another England extends this “historical surrealism,” as he likes to call it.
This time, it’s his native country that goes under the algorithm’s scalpel. This work “is not a warning in the traditional sense, nor pure speculation. It’s an observation,” Phillip Toledano confides to Blind. “It reflects a present where plausibility trumps proof (according, of course, to the algorithm that governs you).” History becomes “visually editable,” facts “infinitely elastic.”
Phillip Toledano reminds us that “the arrival of artificial intelligence means that every lie can now arm itself with convincing visual proof.” However hilarious it may be. He thus imagines a far-fetched historical anecdote. In 1985, the Dover Harbour Board, “desperately seeking funding and terrified by Margaret Thatcher’s growing appetite for privatization,” makes a decision that history would describe as “ill-advised.”
They hire sculptors to carve the Iron Lady’s face into the white cliffs of Dover. The tale comes to life, fiction becomes folklore, and AI seals the pact. The result? “60 feet (18 meters) of limestone grimace, eternally staring at France, her lips pursed as if she’d just digested a socialist.” In an imaginary article, the Guardian calls the gesture “geological hostage-taking.”
To schoolchildren who ask if she’ll ever smile, a tour guide replies with a sigh: “Only if the pound sterling is doing well and the unions keep quiet.” Pigeons refuse to land on it. Some swear they can hear her at night promising that “compassion remains ineffective.” It’s absurd, funny, deadpan… Toledanesque!
Another savory episode in the book recounts how, from 1981 to 1994, the village of Little Latchford in Devon “survived on jellyfish.” It all began with Miss Hazel Cripps, a retired biology teacher who returned from a Cornish winter with “a crate of bioluminescent jellyfish and a theory: with enough salt water and patience, they could replace every light bulb in the village.”
To everyone’s astonishment, her theory proved correct. By 1983, streetlamps transformed into gently swaying brine tanks. The post office glowed thanks to a single large jellyfish named Cyril who would flicker every time someone lied. “It was like being gently judged by marine ghosts,” confides a (fake) villager. The crime rate plummeted. Sleep quality too.
Then the Fox Liberation Army emerged. In 1983, dozens of foxes described as “calm, coordinated” descended on a North Wensum Hunt. They fed the dogs industrial laxatives, slashed corduroys and Viyella shirts, then vanished into the woods. “No blood. Just quiet fury.” Guns were stuffed with marmalade. Hunting horns gave way to tubas.
Not absurd enough for you? Wait for what comes next… A man reports waking up with a fox at his bedside, “paws crossed, expression grave. It shook its head slowly, with disappointment, then vanished through the window.” In the age of post-truth, Phillip Toledano excels in the art of false testimony and British self-mockery. “No more red coats,” the foxes demand, “or we’ll confiscate the Barbours.”
The story is entertaining. Perhaps too much so. Doesn’t this manipulation of images and their accompanying narratives, however amusing, risk normalizing precisely what Phillip Toledano claims to denounce? “AI allows us to create the world as we want to see it, politically, socially, and otherwise. In the case of Another England, the manipulation doesn’t emerge as something ugly but as something delicious,” he acknowledges.
Entertainment, however, is not an end in itself for the artist. “The jellyfish and inflatable sheep aren’t distractions, they form the argument.” After all, nothing prevents one from having fun with both substance and form. In “Operation Puff ‘n Pose,” the English Tourist Authority, faced with the tourist exodus to France (for wine, beaches, nudity—”especially the nudity”), deploys inflatable animals throughout the countryside.
Because “the real ones proved capricious—sheep bolted, birds refused to pose, and cows exposed their udders to tourists.” The Cumbrian hills therefore blossom with inflatable sheep. Tourists are ecstatic. A tipsy Italian asks an inflatable cow to marry him in Surrey. Welcome to Absurdistan! And it works. We’re completely swept up in this artificial tale.
So much so that one wonders about the feasibility of returning to classic photography—with real people, real lighting, trues stories—after such a journey into AI in such good company. Phillip Toledano settles the matter: “It’s better to start from the idea that I haven’t been a photographer for a long time, but rather a conceptual artist.” Before warning: “AI’s Achilles heel as a tool is that it can make mediocrity beautiful.”
Some images in the book, particularly dark ones, are responsible for bringing us painfully back to earth. In one of them, we see in the foreground a cozy country house, warmly lit, while in the background, unnoticed by the occupants, passes an enormous burning airship. A metaphor for our time: we go about our business while the world is burning.
Another England by Phillip Toledano is published by L’Artiere and available for 60 €.
