Paintings - Metapets

Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art Fukushima



Exhibition, École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Arles  

March 11, 2023 – ?
🏡  Museum of Contemporary Art Fukushima

September 30 – December 20, 2024
🏡  École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Arles

February 20–23, 2026
🏡  Kyoto Art Fair

Metapets

Metapets is a hybrid series combining artificial intelligence, poetry, and digital painting, born from a collaboration with neural networks capable of generating images from textual descriptions. The series explores the limits of AI by introducing complex instructions inspired by surrealist poetry and its unexpected formulas—echoing variations of Lautréamont’s famous phrase: “The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a furry animal and an alien jellyfish.” These prompts produced accidental and unforeseen results—poetic glitches—that evoke an artificial unconscious, a dreamlike or delirious state specific to the machine.

The generated images, selected for their metamorphic qualities, form an imaginary bestiary of ectoplasmic chimeras and animist morphologies. I intervened in three stages: formulating textual instructions, modifying visuals within the AI software, and finally reworking each image through digital painting. This iterative process enacts co-authorship and stages a dialogue between human subjectivity and technological randomness. I work with the “excesses” of AI, transforming its accidents and stains into dreamlike visions.

The story of Metapets continues in a fictional dimension. It unfolds within a post-catastrophe museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Fukushima (MOCAF), located near the Fukushima Dai-ni nuclear power plant. As part of its cycle ART AFTER HUMAN, initiated by Yutaro Midorikawa, the museum buries its collection underground, sealed in a time capsule to be rediscovered at an undetermined date—if ever. In this subterranean space, an autonomous and evolving AI creates new life forms each year in response to the collapse of biodiversity on the surface. Radiation interferes with its hardware, corrupting its code. These “creature-creations,” nicknamed Metapets, are revealed to the public each March 11, on the anniversary of the 2011 triple disaster, during an annual ritual.

Metapets thus explores the porous boundaries between human and technological creation, reflecting on AI as an artistic partner. The generated, reinterpreted, and transformed chimeras become metaphors of our time: embodying uncertainty, the dissolution of separations between nature and technology, reality and imagination. The project questions our relationship to emerging technologies and their capacity to produce unprecedented forms—both strange and deeply rooted in our collective imaginaries—while probing what defines our limits, as humans and as a species.

Links:
Metapets – [MOCAF official site – Link]
Metapets – [Critical texts (Midorikawa Yutaro, Thomas Vauthier) – Link]


Project by Thomas Vauthier