Patrick Tresset

Belgium

Patrick Tresset is a Brussels-based French artist known for performative installations that explore humanness through computational systems, AI, and robotics. At the centre of his practice are robots, which Tresset calls "stylized actors," programmed with artistic, expressive, and obsessive behaviours that evoke distinctly human traits. Working from research into how humans make marks, perceive artworks, and relate to machines, he crafts computational systems that produce portraitsand still lifes with a quality that is at once mechanical and strangely intimate. "My work is not at all about technology," Tresset has said. "It is about humanness." He holds a Masters and MPhil in Arts and Technology from Goldsmiths College, London.

His installations have been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and Grand Palais in Paris, the Prada Foundation in Milan, the V&A in London, the MMCA in Seoul, Bozar in Brussels, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, among others. His work has been recognised by Lumen, Ars Electronica, the Liedts-Meesen Foundation, and the Japan Media Arts Festival, and in 2017 he was nominated as a WEF Cultural Leader. A monograph, Patrick Tresset: Human Traits and the Art of Creative Machines, was published in 2016. Although Tresset has focused exclusively on his art practice for the past decade, his earlier research is referenced in over 300 academic publications.


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Wild Flowers 2 - Vertical

wild_flowers_1.mp4

Flowers have long been a constant presence in art history, carrying an innate simplicity: they demand nothing of the viewer, existing entirely in the present. This lack of pretense allows us to look past meaning and engage with them as a subject of pure visual inquiry. In this way, depicting flowers is an avenue for aesthetic exploration.

This series is produced with a guided computational system seeded with the output from a txt2img generative model with simple prompts that all included "depicting the birth of venus". The underlying algorithms were developed by Tresset for his autonomous drawing robotic systems. Here instead of the system working by itself, it is an instrument with little freedom but played by the artist to produce multilayered animations.

technique

generative art

format

portrait

duration

02:00

year

2023

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Generative art
Generative art refers to a way of creating artworks using an autonomous system. In digital art, these are usually generated from code and algorithms created by the artist, often with certain predefined parameters or systems. Although these parameters guide the final outcome of the work, generative art is generally a surprising way to create artworks, as the results are often unexpected and the number of possible outcomes can be infinite.
AI
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3D
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Photogrammetry
Photogrammetry is a specialized 3D technique that allows 3D objects to be created from numerous photographs taken of an object or scene from multiple angles. These photos are then compiled to determine the specific positioning, shape, and dimensions of the object in space, and then converted into a 3D model. Initially developed for engineering and urban planning, photogrammetry has become a way for artists to produce extremely accurate 3D models from real-life images.
Collage
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Video
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