aurèce vettier

"la traversée de la forêt" (2025) is a monumental tapestry by aurèce vettier, a completely unique piece derived from a set of AI-generated images. In recent months, aurèce vettier has expanded the series entitled le travail des rêves, first presented at Bright Moments Paris, shortlisted for the Lumen Prize in 2024 and featured in the last edition of CVPR, into larger oil paintings during his residency at Dragon Hill in the south of France. These large-scale works continue to represent dreams, generated using bespoke CLIP+GAN algorithms trained on personal archives from childhood to the present day, and further refined with outpainting algorithms.

A few months ago, the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon invited aurèce vettier to take over a very large room as part of the exhibition Echoes of the Past, Promises of the Future, dedicated to exploring new aesthetics of artificial intelligence (on view from March 6 to July 13, 2025). As part of this exhibition, he fulfilled a longstanding ambition: to work with the fascinating medium of tapestry. The Jacquard loom, invented in 1804, is often considered one of the first generative systems--its patterns encoded on punched cards that prefigure the earliest computer programming. It was deeply meaningful for aurèce vettier to start with an AI-generated image and translate it into a woven form, working within the constraints of a limited number of threads -25 in this case.

This approach led to the creation of three tapestries, the largest of which is entitled la traversée de la forêt (crossing the forest), measuring 4 meters long by 1.60 meters high. The study and Jacquard encoding of the largest tapestry was minted as an NFT and was finalist of the Arab Bank Switzerland Prize in 2025 (see photo below). The technical challenges of weaving such a complex image with so many threads required significant innovation from the master weavers involved - resulting in a remarkable synthesis of cutting-edge AI imagery and centuries-old craft.