AI as an In-Between: What Artists Who Inhabit the Machine Can Teach Us About Fragmentation

Based on the work of Albertine Meunier and aurèce vettier

by Annelise Stern

For the past few years, one question has been systematically asked of artists working with artificial intelligence. I have heard it in studios, at exhibitions, over dinner, sometimes phrased as an almost aggressive joke: but are you really the one creating? This question never fails to irritate me, perhaps because it rests on a deeply romantic notion of creation. As though artists had always worked alone, in complete mastery of their tools and gestures. Yet this fantasy does not hold up particularly well against the history of art. We forget that Rembrandt did not always make his own pigments. That Rodin did not cast his own bronzes. That Godard did not develop his own film. The question confuses the tool with the author, and the author with the gesture.

And yet, I am fascinated by what this question reveals about our relationship to creation. In itself, it shows just how profoundly artificial intelligence destabilises our understanding of the artist’s position within society. This disturbance is precisely what I want to explore here, through the work of two French artists who have turned that discomfort into fertile ground for research and creation: Albertine Meunier and aurèce vettier. What has always struck me about their respective practices is that they do not attempt to resolve the question. They work at its very core, embracing that unstable zone in which we can no longer quite distinguish what belongs to calculation, intuition, accident or choice. Having watched their practices evolve over the past several years, I recognise in their work the curatorial concept of betweenness that I have theorised: a position of passage between worlds that ignore one another, a position that should never be mistaken for indecision, but understood instead as a productive condition.

The Machine That Does Not Know It Is Going Off the Rails

Albertine Meunier has been working with the Internet for nearly thirty years. Long before generative artificial intelligence became a dinner-party topic, she was already exploring digital data, GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), the digital traces we leave behind without realising it, and above all what the Machine does with all of it. Her project My Google Search History, initiated in 2006, consists of collecting and publishing the entirety of her personal Google searches. The artist transforms data into raw material, as revealing and unsettling as the pages of a private diary.

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To my mind, Albertine Meunier adopts what I would describe as a critical-playful position towards artificial intelligence. She does not worship the machine. Quite the opposite: she cheerfully watches it fail. She is interested, as she puts it, in the aberrations and powerlessness of the machine, and in what artificial intelligence produces without even realising it, turning the absurd, the offbeat, and the nonsense that emerges in the gaps of computation into her signature territory. In her series HyperChips (2023), which I rushed to collect as soon as it was released, she begins with a minimalist prompt: Albertine Meunier is eating sausages and crisps. From the thousands of images generated by DALL-E, she selects the machine’s hallucinations, accumulating oddities, distorted faces, six-fingered hands and nightmarish perspectives. The series revisits the tradition of self-portraiture through the prism of what the Machine believes it understands about human identity.

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Albertine Meunier is not interested in artificial intelligence’s performance. Her trained eye is impressed neither by its capacity to reproduce, nor by its ability to imitate, nor even by its power to generate at scale. What ultimately interests Albertine Meunier is its unconscious, and the computational slips it produces. In doing so, she places the artist in a peculiar position, rejecting the role of the creator who programs in favour of that of the observer who waits and watches. Far removed from alarmist narratives surrounding new technologies, Albertine Meunier assumes the role of the psychoanalyst who listens for symptoms beneath the discourse.

Within an ecosystem saturated with images produced through these new artificial intelligence tools, which she describes as slop, that flood of mediocre content engulfing the Internet since 2022, the artist does not panic: she documents. In October 2025, as co-curator alongside researcher Hugo du Plessix of the exhibition From Spam to Slop at Avant Galerie Vossen, she attempted to press pause, to take stock of a transformation unfolding too quickly for the public to fully comprehend.

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We have to accept that slop is winning, the artist tells me. I see no defeatism in this statement. On the contrary, I see a form of operational realism. An artist who refuses to look at what is happening around them cannot respond to it. Albertine Meunier, by contrast, looks the present tidal wave directly in the face, and it is precisely because she accepts its existence that she can continue working alongside it, neither entirely within it nor safely beyond its reach, but in the in-between of critical consciousness.

The Name the Machine Chose

For his part, aurèce vettier is the name of an artistic project founded in 2019 by Paul Mouginot. An engineer by training and an artist by conviction, he went so far as to entrust an algorithm with choosing his pseudonym, generated from the names of artists admired by both himself and those close to him. Before the first artwork had even been created, the machine had already taken part in defining the artist’s identity. This inaugural gesture foreshadows his entire practice. Here, artificial intelligence is anything but a simple technical tool, like Photoshop or a potter’s wheel, because what interests Paul Mouginot is what happens when part of the essential creative process is delegated to the machine, and we then observe what it gives back to us.

In La traversée de la forêt, presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon in 2025, aurèce vettier unfolds a universe composed of bronze sculptures, Aubusson tapestries and oil paintings, all derived from images generated by artificial intelligence. His work revolves around two ideas he calls sur-nature and sur-réalité. Sur-nature gives rise to impossible botanical forms, trees whose branches fold back into themselves, herbaria of imaginary plants, generated from intimate datasets composed of childhood photographs and personal texts. These visions are then embodied through traditional materials and techniques, including tapestry, bronze, hardstone marquetry and oil painting. Sur-réalité, meanwhile, combines dreams, recollections and fragments of everyday life to produce almost symbolic landscapes, suspended at the boundary between memory and fiction.

What has always intrigued and fascinated me about aurèce vettier’s practice is his relationship to time. At a moment when artificial intelligence has become synonymous with speed, automation and mass production, the artist moves deliberately against the current. He uses older GAN-based algorithms (Generative Adversarial Networks), training them on intimate and personal material, rather than on billions of generic images. His process is slow, almost meditative. He waits patiently for an image to drift slightly off course, for a vegetal form to tremble in an unexpected way, or for a detail to suddenly appear inhabited. From the thousands of fragments generated by the Machine, he meticulously selects only a rare few, those he calls strokes of genius, before translating them into traditional and artisanal forms.

“Before making, I learned a great deal, and I continue to absorb vast quantities of information constantly. Everything interests me; I read a great deal, I explore in silence. Then I digest, both inwardly and with the help of algorithms, remaining open to chance and synchronicities.”

This sentence, taken from a recent interview with curator Dominique Moulon, describes a creative process that belongs neither entirely to the human nor entirely to the Machine, but emerges from the combination of the two. The algorithm becomes an instrument of digestion, synchronicity becomes method, and chance becomes the artist’s most valuable collaborator. Over the years, aurèce vettier has moved deeper and deeper into the most complete form of in-betweenness: between the real and the virtual, between craftsman and engineer, between Aubusson tapestry and Python code, between intimate personal memory and trained data. Any notion of hierarchy seems to disappear. The machine does not simply serve the artist, nor does the artist attempt to dominate the machine. Together, they form what Paul Mouginot calls a membrane: a porous surface through which forms, images and intuitions circulate — things that could never have emerged from either side alone.

What Betweenness Reveals Here

In my previous article for TARGET ART, I introduced the concept of curatorial betweenness, borrowed from mathematical network theory. It refers to a bridge node, a point that does not exist for itself, but for what it allows to pass through it. Perhaps it is time to put an end to the tired refrain that artificial intelligence is “just a tool.” It is only a tool for those who use it as an upgraded photocopier, allowing them to produce more quickly what they would probably have produced anyway. For artists such as Albertine Meunier and aurèce vettier, artificial intelligence is a position: a way of existing halfway between two modes of thought, two modes of production, two regimes of attention.

Albertine Meunier places herself between criticism and laughter, between the political critique of GAFA and the lightness of DataData. Her work is the culmination of a precise understanding of what happens when the machine goes off the rails, with no desire to correct the derailment, but instead a determination to reveal the machine’s accidental poetry. aurèce vettier, meanwhile, positions himself between the intimate and the collective, between personal memory and private data, between the privacy of dreams and the generic nature of the algorithm. His collaboration with Vera Molnar, a pioneer of generative art before her recent passing, situates his practice within a long genealogy of artists who have always sought to understand what the machine can create that a human being could never imagine alone.

These two artists, whose work I am particularly fond of, share a relationship with what I would call chosen powerlessness. Both are at peace with the idea that they cannot control every aspect of their creation, and almost seem to enjoy allowing something to systematically escape them. Ultimately, their works exist precisely within this gap between intention and result, between what the artist wanted and what the machine produced.

Asking the Question of Authorship Differently

Let us return to the question with which we began: are you really the one creating? I dislike this question because it presupposes that there must be a single author. In my view, we should stop asking who creates. I would propose another question instead: where does the artwork come into being?

Whether we are speaking of Albertine Meunier or aurèce vettier, the answer is the same: the artwork comes into being in the in-between. Creation takes shape in the friction between intention and accident, between calculation and intuition, and above all between what the machine knows how to do and what it remains incapable of doing. I will grant you that this is a profoundly uncomfortable answer, and it is easy for the curator, critic, agent and all those other titles I carry to locate creation in such an unstable place. My answer does not allow us to claim any clear maternity or paternity over the work. Nor does it allow the artist to hide behind the machine in order to evade responsibility.

In a world where artificial intelligence tools generate millions of images every day, where slop floods our platforms and the hierarchy of attention has become impossible to read, the artists who will endure will not necessarily be those who master these new technologies most effectively. My wager today is that those who remain will be those who know how to inhabit the moment of friction between themselves and the machine. Those who have understood that value lies not in production, but in position.

What This Means, Now

Whether you are an artist or a curator, the question is not whether or not you should use artificial intelligence, but rather what position you choose to adopt in relation to it.

The instrumental position, which consists of using artificial intelligence as an accelerator of production, certainly exists. It is, without question, the most widespread position today. From the point of view of productivity, it is useful and well on its way to becoming essential, but in the long run it is also undifferentiating. What generic tools produce en masse will inevitably become increasingly difficult to distinguish from what other generic tools produce en masse. Too easy. The betweenness position, by contrast, understanding artificial intelligence as a territory of the in-between, is considerably more demanding. It requires relinquishing total mastery over one’s own creative process. It asks us to accept that something will escape us, and that it is precisely within this elusive gap, the place we cannot fully grasp, that creation occurs.

You are already between. So is the machine.

All that remains is to learn how to work hand in hand within that space of discomfort. And perhaps the most delicious question raised by this article concerns the place I myself have allowed the Machine to occupy within it. Claude.ai’s uncertainty on the matter only makes the secret more delightful.

Annelise Stern founded the artist agency NANA. She developed the concept of curatorial betweenness in response to the growing polarisation of contemporary society and of the art and cultural sectors.