Nature and AI : aurèce vettier, have we already invented everything?

av: When I'm in the studio, I do a lot of experimenting, and I manage to let go a lot, whether it's with code or when I'm using craft techniques. This gives enough entropy for works to appear, emerge, and come together. But there's a big difference with what comes out of the studio—for example, to be exhibited. To leave the studio, my work has to have an aesthetic that suits me and be extremely well finished.

I also need them to be somehow connected to past works and those I'm working on, as I don't really work in series. In addition, it's essential that they convey or be part of a story that's both personal and has universal potential.

When I develop my tools and techniques, I incorporate a lot of personal elements and custom code or data. This very high degree of personalization allows me to remain in control regardless of how technologies evolve.

av: An artist's job is indeed to tell stories. It's not always convenient or preferable to provide a specific message for each of my works, but from a narrative point of view, each of my solo exhibitions is a continuation or fork of the previous one.

I'm not at all seeking to push this narrative on the visitor; it serves to deploy the work, to interconnect the pieces, and also to help me as I move forward in my own existence. I think it's also important to let the works have a life of their own after they've been created and to let visitors experience them in their own way with the keys I provided.

av: I've always had an infinite admiration for Vera Molnár's work, and her works were among my first art acquisitions after my studies. Very early on, therefore, I was in contact with her gallery owners, Oniris in Rennes, as well as curator and art historian Vincent Baby, who wrote "Le système Molnar: (1946–1976)," his doctoral thesis on Vera in 2003 under the direction of Serge Lemoine. I've also had fascinating exchanges with Michael Spalter, who has always been a great supporter of her work, and my friend Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, who this year defended her PhD thesis, "Vera Molnar's Programmed Abstraction: Computer Graphics and Geometric Abstract Art in Postwar Europe".

When Vera Molnár, with her legendary curiosity, became interested in artificial intelligence algorithms, my name came up in conversation, and Vincent Baby arranged for us to meet. For me, it was a truly wonderful and transformative moment. There are times when artists encourage each other across generations. This was the case with Georgia O'Keefe, who inspired Yayoi Kusama to leave Japan and move to the United States to develop her practice.

Vera Molnár arrived in Paris from Hungary in the late 1940s. At that time, she was supported by Sonia Delaunay. Their exchange was highly fertile. I can say that, at almost a hundred years of age, she has passed on the same kind of energy to me, in the course of our conversations and collaboration.

av: We were both fascinated by Albrecht Dürer's works. Vera Molnár, of course, has frequently paid him tribute, notably referencing the magic squares among the many symbols in the engravings. As far as I was concerned, I was very interested in what the eye does not immediately see: backgrounds, atmospheric phenomena, and second-order symbols. 

Our discussion about the engraving of MELANCHOLIA (1514) very quickly became poetic: "standing on the other side of Dürer's polyhedron, what would we see?" The use of a properly trained text-to-image AI was therefore particularly appropriate as a means of generating custom raw material.

Vincent Baby wrote in his curatorial text: "By assembling artificial intelligence algorithms trained on the corpus of Albrecht Dürer and his preparatory sketches and leveraging their generative capacities, [I] offered Vera Molnár a veritable dataset: simili-gravures of an unseen kind, offering dozens of speculative formalizations, imagined from the point of view of a viewer placed behind the polyhedron.

More or less ambiguous spaces appear: under vaults, near arcades, framed by trees or columns, monastic interiors, or landscapes populated by surprisingly shaped plants and animals, witnesses to atmospheric phenomena no less so. The light, alternately solar or lunar, generates extremely varied shadows and reflections that accompany or disrupt, glaze or warm, punctuate or disorganize the surfaces of this mysterious object, but deliver, at the center, the sought-after, hoped-for phantasmatic figure: the hidden face of the polyhedron."

So I trained a text-to-image model on old engravings, not only by Dürer but also engravings by Olfert Dapper from my personal collection. Olfert Dapper was a Dutch humanist born in 1636 who produced engravings of remote locations, sometimes without ever having been there himself. He based his work on the stories of explorers.

From the various possible variations generated by AI, we finally selected sixteen of the most interesting and created simili-engravings as well as a light installation. This is the fruit of our collaboration. What's magnificent is that in our interaction, we have completely reproduced the way in which an AI is created and deployed: starting with an idea, gathering a set of data, training the algorithm, fine-tuning, and selecting what we like.

av: I think there are three main reasons. 

The first is probably the saddest: for many years, what we call digital art, or the art generated by algorithms, was not really considered art, except by a handful of curators or pioneering institutions. And yet, as early as the 1950s, digital artists were demonstrating their fine knowledge of art history and reflecting in depth on the transformations caused by the emergence of machines and computers in their practice. By referencing artists they admired or periods in art history, I believe they wanted to recall their theoretical roots, where they came from, or conversely, to detach themselves from certain currents. In fact, Vera Molnár did a great deal of this, paying homage to artists close to her, like Sonia Delaunay, or further in the past, like Dürer or Monet.

The second is quite moving: many "digital" artists have received no initial training in the art world. Personally, I visualize the history of art as a forest with many trees with roots, branches, and ramifications. Rather than learning art history from the ground up, these artists came up with a particular technique, a particular branch, and gradually discovered other artists, other movements, and became more and more enthusiastic about them. I think this is wonderful and a great source of optimism for art and creation. So these tributes can also be seen as an expression of enthusiasm: just look at how NFT crowds welcomed, for example, Manfred Mohr, Herbert W. Franke, or Frieder Nake when they arrived on social networks.

The third, finally, comes from the fact that a so-called "digital" artist often has a different approach to collaboration. By sharing our knowledge, by building bridges with other artists, or by acknowledging a form of filiation with the past, we don't believe we become poorer; on the contrary, we create the conditions for new adventures. I've often found this to be true in my practice: whereas traditional artists my age might be uncomfortable with the idea of collaborating or sharing their secret recipes, their knowledge, or their ideas, digital artists are much less afraid of sharing these same ideas, their code, or helping each other.

Of course, this is not a general rule, but I've experienced it many times, the latest being our wonderful exhibition POÈME OBJKT / POÈME SBJKT, bringing together artists from all horizons and for which I supervised the catalog.

av: That's the eternal question, isn't it? Have we invented everything? But did photography signify the end of art when it emerged at the end of the 19th century? No, but after a while, we saw that it profoundly transformed the use of other mediums. Pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and August Strindberg pushed back the limits of the medium early on—note that they were both hybrid profiles, one a scientist and the other a writer!

As far as AI is concerned, although I consider it to be a tool, I have to admit that it's not exactly comparable to a camera because AI has "digestion capacities", and algorithms offer the potential to access a form of quintessence. Moreover, technical reproducibility is pushed to the extreme with AI, and it would have been fascinating to hear Walter Benjamin talk about these new tools had he been our contemporary.

Personally, I use it to push myself beyond my own limits, to question my inner thoughts, and to depict my dreams, as I did in my CIRCULAR RUINS exhibition at Darmo Gallery in Paris. This is indeed the beginning of a new chapter.

I believe that what will characterize this chapter is a drastic increase in the standards expected of artists and their production. Let's say I offer you a vehicle with an infinite energy reserve. You can go anywhere. If you have no imagination, no desire for discovery, no interest in the world around you, or don't know other territories even by name or hearsay, you're unlikely to experience an entertaining trip, even with a vehicle allowing you to ride everywhere. The same goes for an AI trained on every image, every text, and every culture in the world.

The possibilities offered by algorithms are vast and immense, but you have to know how to make them talk, push them to their limits, employ them to tell a story, or devise a new world. That's why I'm talking about raising the bar: it's not a technical issue, but really a matter of implementation: will I have enough in me to push these tools beyond their own presumed limits?

av: I have come to the brutal realization that the role of the artist will have to change as a result of my visit to the 58th Biennale di Venezia in 2019. This is one of the factors that triggered my desire to deploy aurèce vettier. When I explored the Biennale, I realized that the vast majority of the proposals, while certainly interesting, consisted of denouncing and describing precisely the problems of our world.

I think that denunciation is no longer sufficient, especially in the age of AI. Or perhaps it is just a starting point. In the 1990s, Sebastião Salgado and his wife restored a forest environment in Brazil. This tremendous work was immortalized in the 2014 film THE SALT OF THE EARTH, directed by Wim Wenders and the photographer's son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. It's an example of work that is both denunciation and action, simultaneously aesthetic, theoretical, therapeutic, and spiritual.

Being an artist isn't exactly a choice; it often just happens to us. Sometimes, our great sensitivity makes us vulnerable to the world's tremors, yet often, it also gives us the possibility of imagining—or even repairing—futures a few days, months, or years ahead of time. At our own level, we need to shift from denunciation to proposing possibilities for the future. Many artists are already doing this, but I believe that this is the way the artist's role will evolve.

Aristotle states in PHYSICS that "art imitates nature". The word art to translate the Greek word technè is undoubtedly very reductive, and photography or 3D scanning didn't exist at the time. Nevertheless, every artist at some point positions themselves in relation to nature and the environment, whether because their work takes place in nature, because they represent natural or organic forms, or because they reject nature altogether in their approach.

In the age of the metaverse, I feel an increasingly evident parallel between the subtlety of nature, its fragility, and that of technology.

In an interview I conducted with artist Grégory Chatonsky and the u2p050 collective, Chatonsky remarked that the more sophisticated technology becomes, the more fragile works it engenders. It was already difficult to properly preserve videos, whose formats change every five years, but it's even harder to preserve websites from the 1990s, or NFTs, and the files they link to.

In any case, it seemed like a limitless subject to explore, and natural forms are very present in my work. For POTENTIAL HERBARIUMS, a body of work I started working on in 2019, I trained an AI algorithm called GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) on over 4 million herbarium plates, many of which I made myself using plants from my hometown.

This algorithm enabled me to generate impossible, very anti-Darwinian plant forms, which moved me greatly and which I now deploy in the form of oil paintings, bronze sculptures, or digital works. I don't think I'm moving away from nature; in fact, quite the opposite: technology allows me to renew my love and fascination for it. For the moment, this very technology is only capable of imitating nature, not surpassing its infinite intelligence. I think that's what we're witnessing with POTENTIAL HERBARIUMS.

av: Nowadays, we have a rare opportunity to conduct artistic research that is much more experience-based, or at least takes more dimensions into account, than it used to be. By looking with interest at the possibilities offered by AI and technologies and exploiting those that are relevant to our practice, but also by knowing how to place our limits and choosing not to be a slave to the tools, we serenely push our own limits, opening ourselves up to learning and growing. 

Moreover, by adopting a rhizomatic approach, no longer seeing ourselves as isolated egos but as active nodes in a rich network, interacting strongly with the world around us, we open the way to unprecedented artistic adventures.

Finally, by taking into account the artist, the collector, the visitor, and the world and intersecting these stakeholders with aesthetic, theoretical, political, therapeutic, and spiritual concerns, we create a new reading grid to offer not denunciation but hypotheses of desirable futures.In the very near future, I'm going to make sure that my work and its dissemination help to improve or repair real issues in the world.

These aren't really predictions, but they outline the directions I'm taking towards a world I want to live in.