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CULTURE

Court upholds ban on French rapper accused of ‘defending terrorism’

A French court has upheld a ban on a concert by a French rapper accused of anti-Semitism and "defending terrorism", just hours before he was due on stage.

Published: 16 February 2024 08:52 CET
Court upholds ban on French rapper accused of 'defending terrorism'
Freeze Corleone (Image: Youtube screengrab Mangemort Squad)

Freeze Corleone, whose real name is Issa Lorenzo Diakhate, was due to play in the northern city of Lille on Thursday evening and in Lyon on Saturday, but authorities in each city had banned the concerts.

A Lille court rejected a last-minute attempt by the rapper to overturn the Lille ban. No ruling has yet been made about the Lyon concert.

The 31-year-old artist has faced repeated criticism since 2020 when he compared himself to Adolf Hitler in his debut album and many accused him of anti-Semitism.

Last week, he released a new song in which he compares himself to a truck, in what some people have seen as a reference to the 2016 Nice terror attack that killed 86 people.

The lyrics prompted prosecutors in the Mediterranean city to open an investigation over him allegedly “defending terrorism”.

Corleone on Thursday morning sent a lawyer to an administrative court in Lille just hours ahead of the cancelled performance.

“They’re trying to smear the artist, disparately sampling comments that might shock the bourgeoisie,” lawyer Sanjay Mirabeau said.

Another lawyer was due to appear in another court in Lyon.

In Corleone’s latest single “Haaland”, a duo with German rapper Luciano, lyrics include: “I arrive in rap like a truck that bombs hard on the…”

His lawyer argued in court that the sentence was open-ended and could mean any number of things, and said the offending song was not in the line-up for the Lille concert.

Fans of the rapper who had bought tickets for the concert huddled in the back of the courtroom.

And some fans gathered at the Zenith concert hall in Lille in the evening, vainly hoping the concert would go ahead.

Corleone in 2020 caused a stir after the release of his debut album “LMF”.

In his lyrics, he said that he arrived “determined like Adolf in the 1930s”, that he doesn’t “give a damn about the Shoah”, or Holocaust.

The album also contained references to popular conspiracy theories.

Corleone, whose father is Senegalese and mother Italian, was born on the outskirts of Paris but has also lived in Canada and in Dakar.

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CULTURE

French art group uses brainwaves and AI to recreate landscapes

The hyper colour image of a dark hill and lava flow is pretty enough -- but its high-tech artificial intelligence origins make it special.

Published: 11 May 2024 16:21 CEST
French art group uses brainwaves and AI to recreate landscapes

It is the product of the brainwaves of one member of French art collective Obvious, collected in an MRI machine at the Brain Institute of the Pitie Salpetriere hospital in Paris.

“I was thinking very hard about a volcano,” said Pierre Fautrel, one of the trio.

He admits the resulting work was not exactly what he had in mind, “but it has kept the basic elements: a flaming mountain with flowing lava and a landscape on a light background”.

The trio of thirty-somethings, Fautrel, Hugo Caselles-Dupre and Gauthier Vernier, already gained international attention in 2018 by selling an AI-generated artwork at Christie’s in New York for more than €400,000.

For the latest project, “Mind to Image”, they used an open-source programme, MindEye, which is able to retrieve and reconstruct viewed images from brain activity, combining it with their own AI programme to create artworks.

They tried two different versions — one in which they looked at pictures and tried to replicate them simply through their brainwaves captured in the MRI.

They also tried recreating their invented images based on written descriptions.

For each, they repeated the process many times over 10 hours to create a database for their AI.

Reconstructing ‘imagined’ images

“We’ve known for around 10 years that it’s possible to reconstruct a viewed image from the activity of the visual cortex,” said Alizee Lopez-Persem, a researcher at the Brain Institute.

“But not an ‘imagined’ image — that’s a real challenge.”

It took the team many hours to sort through the data collected in the MRI, before Obvious fed it into their own AI programme, which gives it a specific vibe influenced in part by Surrealism.

“Two years ago, I would never have believed that this could exist,” said Charles Mellerio, a neuro-radiologist who assisted the project.

He credits huge advances in the quality of medical imaging, as well as the sudden emergence of generative AI, which can create images from written prompts.

“There are very real links between art and science,” said Caselles-Dupre, while acknowledging that this technology “can be very scary if used in the wrong way”.

The results of their project will be on display at the Danysz gallery in Paris in October and the group says they want to expand the project to sound and video.

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