Patrick Tresset

A series of animated and still images by French contemporary artist Patrick Tresset that depict fables about our traits, produced through a collaboration between two AI agents: a storyteller and an artist.

The animation process unfolds on a single surface, using a cycle of drawing, erasing, wiping, and overdrawing to depict the passage of time, a technique Tresset compares to the moving drawings of William Kentridge. Rather than forcing a style onto the agent, the artist equipped it with only simple tools: lines, circles, splines, hatchings and scribbles.

As with his previous works, Tresset continues to explore traditional themes in Western culture. Here, he returns to an ancient subject: the Seven Deadly Sins. It is a theme present throughout art history, from the stone facades of cathedrals, the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel, and the literature of Dante, to modern cinema as with Peter Greenaway, Steve McQueen.

In Seven Traits, Tresset looks at these same subjects but changes the perspective. The word "sin" implies an exceptional impulse, a lapse in judgment that one must actively resist. Tresset, as others have done, sees it differently: humans possess these behaviors as their default state. The human effort is not in resisting temptation, but in the impossible effort to evolve away from baseline programming.

For Tresset, the pull toward this subject is also autobiographical. Culturally he is Catholic; it is an inescapable foundation. He grew up in a small town dominated by a massive cathedral, in a family that even had its own priest to perform our baptisms and weddings. It is impossible not to be shaped by this history.

In his practice Tresset never focuses directly on contemporary pressing issues such as untamed capitalism, or political and environmental disasters; instead, he sees these traits as the unchanging roots from which they all originate.

The agents

Although these multimodal models have a vast knowledge of human culture they do not have a visual perception or imagination, their understanding of the world remains semantic and statistical. Tresset observes that when the agent constructs an image, it is translating data tokens based on descriptions rather than recalling a visual memory. This computational approach strips away human emotional influence, resulting in a visual language that feels naive, cryptic, and akin to Art Brut. While human visual memory is influenced by emotions by psychology, the AI’s memory is probabilistic, causing the stories and compositions to develop in strange directions that diverge from what we would choose.

In this context Tresset views what technologists usually dismiss as "hallucinations" as assets. These divergences  inject a strangeness and unpredictability into the fables, yet with a logic. Because the works operate on a different psychological frequency, they are not designed to grab the viewer's attention in a single glance. Instead, the work demands patience. To grasp the narratives  the viewer must have a desire,  and make a small effort towards the works, watching the animations multiple times and actively observing the shifting details. 

The system used to produce this body of work is based on the research Tresset conducted as part of the EACVA project: where Markus Wulfmeier from DeepMind served as an advisor. The framework Tresset developed incorporates embodiment across various mediums, driving robotic installations as well as producing digital works, sculptures, and paintings. This research is a continuation of the concepts originally described in his paper "Artistically Skilled Embodied Agents," published in the proceedings of The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) in 2014.

Presented exclusively by Hash Gallery.