Jules: Finally, do you prefer to simply simulate reality, or rather, to create an independent reality?

Chadi: It depends on the projects. We can sometimes leave our mark! For the same Matrix I worked on, we had to create a scene with thousands of screen images. We decided with the whole team to insert our heads into these screens, as it was a question of creating the world. It was our signature, and the directors loved it. So yes, I also propose my version of reality, by retouching it a little.

Céline: What can an art of the image like cinema represent for scientists?

Jules: The image, for the scientist, is an investigative medium in itself. Some experimental results are images, like curves for example. In my work, I get images much less beautiful—or at least different—from those produced by Chadi. It reminds me of the words of Feynman, a scientist I greatly admire.5 In one of his lectures, he talks about the rainbow, a phenomenon that fascinates us all, physi-cists, painters, and dreamers, and shows curves of light intensity as a function of wavelength. He then asks this important question: are these curves as beautiful as a rainbow? For a physicist, it is an image of the rainbow. It is very beautiful because it embodies the way a physicist apprehends a rainbow. He can see an incredible beauty in it because he sees the decomposition of white light under certain con-ditions. He can also see light rays entering it and exiting it at different angles. It’s a certain image of the rainbow. This question of how to share this image, its beauty, with non-physicists puzzled me a lot as a student.

Chadi: Images are not just visual. They are in texts, poetry... I understand what you mean. Feynman’s curve is not just visual; it contains a lot of information. Just a few days ago, I was watching an interview with a well-known Japanese astronaut. His quest is to discover supernovae. He was showing curves on the screen, and suddenly, when he saw one with a peak, he started crying, almost hysterically. It impressed me, and I thought he saw something that I am not capable of seeing.

Jules: To return to the question of images, when I am facing a painting, I will question what this image is. Once, a physicist colleague suggested defining an image as a table of numbers. But when I am facing a painting, is it just a table of numbers? What differentiates them? Maybe what differentiates them is the rela-tionship between the numbers? In any case, for an artist, there is surely something else to consider.

Chadi: At the beginning of my career, I was coding programs. I understood that the image is not just a table of numbers. It is also three mixed colors, shapes, with nuances that the eye cannot perceive.

Jules: I am a very bad programmer myself. However, I have this particular way of speaking to my daily life, almost obsessively, and it is something we surely share. And today, we are starting to talk to computers through our own language, like with ChatGPT.

Chadi: Artificial intelligence is a hot topic in my field. Fortunately, it is easy to detect an image produced by AI. However, I find that AI also reveals very inter-esting things. The forms it produces evoke memories of our dreams. If we really lived in a simulation, would AI be the part that produces dreams?