aurèce vettier

aurèce vettier is an art project founded in 2019 by Paul Mouginot (b. 1990). The alias, generated through an algorithm, embodies a collaborative, open, and hybrid approach – one that blurs the boundaries between human intent and machine-generated possibilities. 

At the core of aurèce vettier’s practice lies a constant back-and-forth between two intertwined dimensions: a sur-naure and a sur-reality. The sur-nature emerges from algorithmic explorations of organic forms – particularly in the Potential Herbariums series, where AI generates impossible flora trained on millions of botanical specimens. These spectral plants, transposed into oil paintings, bronze sculptures, and tapestries, question our contemporary urge to digitize, sanctify, and ultimately erase nature. Despite vast training datasets, artificial intelligence struggles to replicate the adaptive logic of living organisms, producing instead a fragile, self-destructive ecosystem – an “anti-Darwinian” nature akin to the dreamlike landscapes of Mount Analogue, the unfinished philosophical novel by René Daumal. 

Parallel to this, the sur-reality explores the subconscious as a space for AI-driven creation. Since 2021, aurèce vettier has developed and trained custom AI models on personal archives – childhood photographs, family records, digital traces – to generate dreamlike visual compositions based on his waking recollections. This fusion of personal memory and algorithmic reconstruction has led to le travail des rêves, a body of work that materializes through various craftsmanship techniques, including painting, sculpture, bas-reliefs, and textile-based mediums such as tapestry. 

Rather than treating AI as a tool, aurèce vettier approaches it as a collaborator – an entity that introduces rupture, anomaly, and poetic accident into artistic creation. By continuously shifting between computational processing and material experimentation, his work extends a lineage of generative art while questioning the limits of artificial intelligence itself.

Poetry remains the backbone of aurèce vettier’s entire approach, from his early AI-assisted poetry book Elegia Machina (2019) to his sculptural and pictorial practice today. Whether through algorithmic distortions of language, landscapes, or memory, his work operates at the threshold between the known and the unknown – forever navigating the space between human consciousness and the machine’s alien gaze.