Collectif Obvious, meeting with the precursors of crypto art in France

Collective Obvious, meeting with the precursors of crypto art in France

Released August 23, 2022

4 min

The rise of NFTs and the metaverse is paving the way for new modes of creation in the art world. Meeting with Pierre Fautrel, member of the artist collective Obvious and precursor of crypto art in France.

« In 2018, we were among the first French artists to create NFTs.», says the artist 2.0 Pierre Fautrel. Four years later, the collective of artists to which he belongs exhibited his works at the Galeries Lafayette on the occasion of a summer season dedicated to the French Touch. Composed of three artists, the Obvious collective works on AI art, a subcategory of crypto art that uses artificial intelligence (AI). " When other artists use paint or a camera, we use AI algorithms, it's our working tool », explains Pierre Fautrel. With more than 50 works in five years, these precursors of crypto art in France saw their legitimacy explode in 2021 with the democratization of NFTs. Meet.

How would you define crypto art?

Crypto art is art that sells on the blockchain. There is no common aesthetic in crypto art but many sub-genres like trash art, AI art, generative art, etc. Before the blockchain, there was a technological lock, selling digital art was almost impossible because of copy-paste. NFTs solve this problem because there is now only one owner of the work.

Crypto art is also growing with the metaverse in which we have already organized an exhibition. But, even if it opens up new possibilities, I find that the technology is not up to the hype. There is still progress to be made in terms of immersion, artistic direction and technological locks to be broken.

How do you create your works?

As in any creative process, you need technique and a message to convey. We create dematerialized art like NFT but also physical art from digital tools. In AI art, there are dozens of algorithms such as text or image generation from parameters. By mixing them, we obtain an infinity of possibilities. We don't create anything ex nihilo, we take bits of existing algorithms and produce a work.

Our mission is to reconcile science and art by showing that the history of the latter is linked to the history of the progression of tools. Then, we wonder about the place of AI in our society. Is she creative? Inventive? How do people react to it?
We try to embark on projects where we are not expected. We redesigned a car in collaboration with Alpine, created a pair of Nikes, and soon we will put AI at the service of gastronomy. An algorithm will generate haute cuisine dishes which will then be cooked by starred chefs.

What are your key "pieces"?

I would say Edmond de Belamy, the first portrait painted by an artificial intelligence. It sold at the famous Christie's auction house for half a million dollars in 2018. It is the archetypal portrait of a French nobleman, in a gold frame. To create it, we gave 15 portraits of nobles to an algorithm which then created Edmond de Belamy. At the bottom right is the mathematical formula of the algorithm to invite people to question who created this table.

Currently, our site we are marianne.fr aims to create the future French Marianne using AI. We have found that choosing a woman for her plastic or her career is outdated. The objective is to collect as many photos of French women as possible so that the algorithm can recreate a woman who reflects our Republic. We already have nearly 6 participants and we invite all women volunteers to participate in this project.