Robot-rêveur

“The lion is made of assimilated sheep.”
— Paul Valéry

Which of the machine or the artist is the other’s vassal? The practice of aurèce vettier brings the question of the genesis of creation to the fore. This begins with his pseudonym itself, generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) from the names of artists he admires. In this sense, “aurèce vettier” encompasses both the artist and the entire array of technical, physical, and human means that assist him throughout the creative process.

A similar principle of altering the real runs through the whole body of work, at once anthropofugal and deeply poetic. Across his painted and written series, the omnipotent presence of the artist is always, to some extent, withheld. Reality is instead sampled as raw material, only to re-emerge in the form of simulated realities whose creative potential lies precisely in their dissonance.

As Jean Baudrillard writes in the epigraph to the first chapter of Simulacra and Simulation: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” Here, the aesthetic quest proceeds through a random, automatic, and generative calculus that is profoundly Mallarméan, which the artist synthesises while refusing to separate fantasy from the thing itself.

Images pushing against the limits of reason, aurèce vettier’s herbariums, in particular, depict chimerical, anti-Darwinian plants that could never survive in nature. Improbable nodules, floating and crackling propagules: these hybrid formations reveal their stochastic and combinatorial origins. The same applies to the series of colorimeters, in which the process of colour calibration refers back to no tangible object.

For Paul Klee, “genius is the error in the system.” To classify and subject to scientific order that which does not exist is, in other words, to enchant the imponderable. Fulfilling the predictions of twentieth-century mathematician and pioneering computer theorist Alan Turing—that machines would one day become capable of producing poetry—Elegia Machina is a monacal fugue with Oulipian inflections.

In words as in images, there emerges a tension between the vast mass of data assimilated by the computer and the formal simplicity of the resulting work, which often tends towards abstraction. In the series of oil paintings, plants are generated using an AI that imagines potential specimens growing on the inaccessible summits of Mount Analogue¹. Set within compositions whose uniform beige backgrounds cast doubt upon the human hand behind them, these intricate, cavernous forms are arranged like emblems, or deployed as signs belonging to a new language.

Drawing on a scriptural rather than expressive conception of art, as advocated by Barthes in Empire of Signs, aurèce vettier’s machines for writing, painting, and dreaming unfold generic objects as pictographic grammars that remain to be deciphered.

Etymologically, the machine—from the Greek machana, meaning “device” or “contrivance”—and the robot—from the Slavic rabota, meaning “work”—are both means directed towards an end: they serve a human vision. Even in the most advanced forms of AI, technology can only truly be understood as “intelligent” insofar as it is used, manipulated, and activated like a language.

Against collapse-oriented narratives predicting the replacement of human beings by machines, aurèce vettier’s practice foregrounds instead a principle of creative and generative collaboration between the two. The passages between tangible reality and the digital world within this interspecies dialogue do not operate in only one direction. Rather, they give rise to a symbolic and mystical intoxication that ultimately offers a counterforce to modern forms of dehumanisation.

¹ Title of René Daumal’s unfinished novel, published in 1952.