The Jean-Kenta Gauthier gallery stand at the Paris Photo fair, the world's leading still-image event taking place in the Grand Palais Ephémère until Sunday, November 12, might come as a surprise. There are no images, only words, in English. They have been inscribed on the walls by American artist David Horvitz, like haikus. "Pebbles thrown into the sunset," "Ela's shadow, days old." Or just, "Money." These are the descriptions of personal, banal digital images that the artist has plucked from his archives and decided to erase for good. It is a poetic way of evoking the flood of images that characterizes our age, our mania for living every moment through instant photographs.

This "low tech" work is paradoxically presented in the fair's new "digital sector," which, for the first time, brings together artists working with digital technology. "Visitors will no doubt find that it doesn't look very digital!" said Swiss curator Nina Roehrs, who has brought together the work of some 30 artists on nine stands. "This section concerns artists who use the digital as a tool, but also all those who are interested in the way it disrupts all our societies. The result can therefore take any digital or physical form," said Roehrs. "The artists here range from the computer art pioneers of the 1950s-1960s to those working on artificial intelligence [AI]." Paris Photo is currently one of the only fairs to have a section devoted to digital art, which doesn't surprise Roehrs: "Photographers have been confronted with the arrival of digital for a long time now."

It is true that there are a few screens on site, but above all there are lots of photo prints, drawings, images on various media, sculptures, objects and even an arcade game reinvented by young Robbie Barrat, at the Avant Galerie. At the age of just 22, this American is, in fact, a historic artist of artificial intelligence and crypto art, a genre linked to blockchain technology (the blockchain enabling information to be stored and transmitted without a controlling body) .

For his project The Big Buck Hunter, he pirated a famous hunting game that involved shooting deer with a rifle. "It's a game I played as a child in West Virginia," he said, "but I was struck by its violence. You only see the scenery for a few seconds, and the deer are perpetually on the run." In his version, this game of death has become an environmental contemplation, with deer grazing peacefully in untouched nature. The work is only available in the form of the physical game, to be plugged in at home – Barrat could have edited scenes from the game as digital images, but he has resolutely given up on NFTs, non-fungible tokens, disgusted by the speculation around his works.

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