I Am Entirely There
In dialogue with Patrick Tresset
FVTVRIST Magazine // Text by Elina P.
20 May 2026
Ahead of the opening of Automata Anima (Soul of the Machine) curated by Valentina Buzzi at ArtVerse Gallery in Paris, Fvtvrist met Patrick Tresset. The exhibition runs in two chapters: a solo presentation of Tresset's work from May 21 to 27, followed by a conversation between his practice and the work of Céline Shen, on view from June 2 to June 20.
For over two decades, Tresset has been building robots that draw. His installations in which robotic systems portray willing visitors over the course of twenty minutes have been shown in museums and institutions across the world. The work sits at the intersection of art, robotics, and cognitive science, and has consistently generated the same reaction in audiences, regardless of country or context.
We spoke ahead of the opening about his relationship to the machines, the role of the face in his practice, and what happens when two AI agents are left to make sense of contemporary society on their own terms.
PATRICK TRESSET
HUMAN STUDY #1, Remote
© Courtesy of the artist.
Patrick Tresset. Photo: Simon_Haseneder © Courtesy of the artist.
In previous interviews, you've described your robots as "embodied agents," mechanical extensions of your own hand and eye. After all this time working with them, do you still feel that way, or have they become something more (or less) autonomous?
They were never really an extension of my hand, actually. They are more of a substitute. I started working with robotic systems precisely to create distance from the artwork, to remove my hand from it entirely. So they don't extend me so much as replace me. They are autonomous, designed to react, to make drawings, to follow the strategies I developed when I was still a painter.
It all started from a very personal place. I was a painter, and at a certain point I became stuck in my practice . I could no longer see myself in the work in a way I found tolerable. So I turned to machines as a way of continuing to be an artist, because drawing was what I couldn't let go of. I designed and built these systems specifically to bring a distance between myself and the work.
Paul's Memories Series
Industrial robot, human intervention, embodied
Al (computer vision + feedback loop), impasto, glazes
© Courtesy of the artist.
So in a way it allowed for a certain anonymity: less of the artist's presence and more of pure creation?
Yes, though it's more nuanced than that. There is still a substance of me in them. , I write the software that controls the behaviours myself, so in that sense I am also inside the machine. There is a constant back and forth. I am entirely present in the conception, and entirely absent in the execution.
Once the robots begin, I don't interfere, and that was crucial for me, because I had completely lost my spontaneity as a painter. Working through the machines gave it back. I think very carefully about what they should do, and then I let go. What comes out is genuinely spontaneous. The early versions were designed to replicate something like a biologically inspired nervous reaction, which sounds strange, but it's really how they work.
Something else I noticed early on was that the robots were very good actors. And actors have always worked from life, so I began situating the installations differently, in various contexts, with different subjects, to tell different stories.
We Are Here and Now Series
Painting machine, human intervention, embodied, Al, impasto, glazes
© Courtesy of the artist.
PATRICK TRESSET
HUMAN STUDY #1,
© Courtesy of the artist.
That balance between presence and absence seems very carefully measured. Did you arrive at that consciously?
Not entirely. As an artist, you do things and then you understand what you've done. There are accidents, there are unexpected results. And sometimes what happens is that something becomes more delegated than you intended. After the first robot exhibition, I looked at the work and realised it was better than what I had been making myself. So I shifted. I began working more on the scenography, on the situation, while still drawing on the body of practice underneath, because that's where all of it came from.
So it was a pragmatic decision at first, before it became a conceptual one?
Yes, essentially. I had a physical constraint very early on, and when I found myself blocked in my painting practice, it felt almost natural to change medium. But the results were very interesting, in a way I genuinely hadn't anticipated.
The machines are one side of the work, but the subject is almost always the face, the human figure. Something very intimate, and very connected to the history of art. Why do you keep coming back to it?
I should say that I'm not really interested in the portrait as a genre or a tradition. What draws me is the depiction of human beings more broadly. The portrait carries a lot of historical baggage - social position, formal convention, and that's not what I'm after. What interests me is the reaction to someone's presence.
I've been fascinated with faces since I was very young. It was a continuous motif in my painting practice long before the robots. The face is extraordinarily complex as a subject: we are neurologically wired to interpret it, it carries emotion, it creates presence. It has enormous power over the viewer. And of course it has an immense history. All of that together makes it inexhaustible for me.
Are the faces of people close to you, or how do you choose your subjects?
It varies. Sometimes it's people I know, sometimes it's someone I've encountered whose face I find compelling for a reason I can't always articulate. But the choice of subject matters less than what the face does once it's in the work. The face is the motif, the presence is the content.
And there's something in the idea of presence itself that feels central to everything you make.
Yes, completely. Presence is really at the heart of it.
The face is extraordinarily complex
as a subject: we are neurologically wired
to interpret it, it carries emotion,
it creates presence. It has enormous power over the viewer. And of course it has
an immense history.
All of that together makes
it inexhaustible for me.
You've shown your work in very different contexts: major institutions, galleries, public spaces. How does the space affect the work, and how do you perceive the audience's reaction?
What strikes me is that the reaction has barely changed, even as the technological landscape around us has shifted enormously. Everywhere I've shown the work, people have essentially the same response. The intensity varies, there are cultural differences in how it manifests, but the fundamental reaction is consistent.
There are always two positions in the room: the person being portrayed, and the audience observing the performance. Both are essential. The piece is really designed to be experienced from the outside. In a gallery, you need an audience for the work to fully activate. When people understand they have a role, they become genuinely engaged.
And does the institutional context change how the work is received?
Significantly, and this is one of the real complexities of working with technology in an art context. In a museum, people arrive already oriented toward art. They are prepared to encounter something that asks something of them. Outside that frame, it becomes more ambiguous. People can easily read the work as a technological demonstration rather than an artistic act. When you go to the theatre, you know you're watching a play, but you willingly enter the fiction anyway. With this kind of work, people tend to believe what they see more literally, which creates a very strange perceptual effect. So I'm quite strict about how the work is displayed and contextualised. The environment has to signal clearly that this is art.
There's also an entertainment dimension to the work that I can't entirely ignore. It's part of what has allowed me to sustain a practice. But it's also genuinely complex, because entertainment creates access in one direction and can close it in another.
Let's move to the exhibition. In Seven Contemporary Traits, two AI agents, one a storyteller, one an artist, dialogue to produce animations about contemporary society. When you observe the process, does it feel like they're genuinely trying to make sense of the world, or something closer to pure observation?
It depends entirely on how you frame the theme, because the agents are always responding to a question I've posed. I design the system, I give it a subject. But the results are genuinely unexpected. They don't try to please. There's a kind of objectivity to what comes out, even when the subject is explicitly human or social.
The animations are somewhat abstract. There are two agents, a storyteller and an artist illustrator, one expresses itself with words, the other with drawings. They dialogue to imagine stories about us. You can recognise figures, but making sense of what you're seeing takes attention and imagination, because the illustrator doesn't always do what the storyteller described, or it does so in a very unexpected way. There's a constant slippage between the narrative and the animation. If you read the text alongside the visual, then it suddenly all makes sense .
I think this comes from the fundamentally different way these systems learn the visual world. They don't see it the way we do. The visual part of the models works through descriptions of images rather than images themselves.I gave the artist agent simple tools: to draw circles, hatching, scribbles, and paths. It produces a visual language that is stylised in an unexpected way, something close to a machine Art Brut, the style is not forced it is emergent, influenced by the model’s characteristics. The same stylisation happens in the stories. What feels salient to these systems is not what would feel salient to us. But then again, we always project meaning onto them. We look and we interpret. That's really what the work is about.
Human Study #1 invites visitors to sit and be drawn by robots for twenty minutes. What happens during that time, for the person sitting?
Practically speaking, the drawings simply aren't interesting in less than twenty minutes. That's the minimum time the process needs to develop into something that appears finished. But beyond the technical reason, the piece is designed to be experienced from the outside as much as from within. Having someone sit completely still for twenty minutes is something very particular. The person becomes part of the installation, not just its subject.
Twenty minutes isn't actually that long. People spend twenty minutes on their phones without noticing. But when you sit for a portrait, I always tell people that they are part of a performance, that holding the pose is an active contribution, not a passive one. When people understand that, they don't get bored, because stillness becomes an act. Your mind begins to move in unexpected ways. You start to notice things: that the robots have distinct characters, that one is nervous and erratic, another precise and slow.
It can become quite meditative. You are very present to the work, but you are also being absorbed from the outside, which for many people feels surprisingly vulnerable. You're being observed by the machine, and by the audience forming around you, and you are simultaneously becoming part of the installation. For some people it's a genuinely emotional experience.More intense than they expected.
Contemporary 7 traits. 2026
Prints
© Courtesy of the artist.
Curatorial Note on Automata Anima (Soul of the Machine)
For several decades, Tresset's practice has navigated the symbiotic territories where human sensibility meets algorithmic agency, exploring the anima (the vital breath) as a current that flows indifferently through carbon and code, enquiring into the human soul.
By transforming the gallery space into a laboratory inhabited by "embodied agents," the exhibition approaches technology as a quiet expansion of the self and the physical world, stretching the limits of human perception, epistemology, and spiritual inquiry. Tresset’s philosophy softly challenges the traditional romanticism of the artist’s touch. The custom-programmed systems function as autonomous computational substitutes, designed to recall and execute strategic behaviors forged during his early career as a painter. By shifting the totality of his presence into the conceptual architecture of the software, the artist steps away from execution, achieving a calculated anonymity that gives rise to a genuine, emergent spontaneity where he remains entirely present in the moment of conception, yet entirely absent during the physical act of creation.
Valentina Buzzi
About Patrick Tresset
Patrick Tresset is a contemporary French artist based in Brussels. Best known for his performative installations, he explores the representation of human presence and experience using computational systems, AI, robotics, and traditional media.
Tresset studied at Goldsmiths College in London from 2004, where he earned a master’s and an MPhil in Arts and Technology. Following this, he was a senior research fellow at the University of Konstanz and later a visiting adjunct professor at the University of Canberra. Although he has focused exclusively on his artistic practice for the past decade, his research into computational creativity and graphics is referenced in over 300 academic publications, including drawing, psychology, AI, robotics and computational graphics.
Since 2011 he had sixteen solo shows and his work has been exhibited in group exhibitions in major museums worldwide, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Prada Foundation in Milan, the V&A in London, the MMCA in Seoul, the Grand Palais in Paris, BOZAR in Brussels, TAM in Beijing, Mcam in Shanghai, and the Mori Museum in Tokyo.
His installations, paintings, drawings, and digital works are included in public and private collections and have received prizes and distinctions, including from Lumen, Ars Electronica, NTAA-Liedst Foundation and the Japan Media Festival. He was also nominated a 2017 WEF cultural leader.
His installations have been featured in various media outlets, such as Art Press, Art Review, Beaux Arts, Frieze, Arte, Form, Wired, Vice, BBC, DeWelle, Le Monde, The New York Times and Neural.
About ArtVerse
Located in the heart of Le Marais in Paris, ArtVerse is a contemporary digital art gallery founded by Sébastien Borget and Arthur Madrid
(The Sandbox), a first-generation digital and crypto art curator. ArtVerse brings digital creations into the physical world, exploring the evolving relationship between virtual works and real-life presence.
As the boundaries between the material and immaterial continue to blur, ArtVerse champions a new wave of artists who blend traditional techniques with digital innovation. The gallery elevates both emerging and established digital artists, positioning them within the broader discourse of contemporary art.
With a thoughtful and forward-looking curatorial approach, ArtVerse serves as a vital platform to understand how image, memory, and artistic expression are being reshaped in the post-digital age.
_a.avif)
