Filipe Vilas-Boas PT
La Fontaine’s Fables

Interactive installation

Exhibition “ Fabulations — Reclaiming Our Voices, Reinventing Language

October 30 through January 17, 2027
, Wednesday through Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.

21 bis, Mirabeau – Departmental Cultural Center
Aix-en-Provence

Credits

Production: The-Fairy.com
Partner: BNF, Gallica
Special thanks to: Musée Jean de La Fontaine, Château-Thierry

After creating a17th-century French language model specialized for Jean de La Fontaine’s corpus of texts—and then incorporating a new animal pair suggested by the public—this “fable fountain,” conceived long before ChatGPT, generates and composes new poems in the style of the famous author. Originality, creativity, grammatical accuracy, rhetoric, and the relevance of the moral: the new writings are categorized and selected for exhibition while allowing the automated writing process to run its course.

A poet of satire and ethics—themes dear to the artist’s heart—Jean de La Fontaine was also the author who guided him in learning the French language; he therefore assumed that La Fontaine’s work provided the perfect foundation for machine learning.