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.
Filipe Vilas-Boas
An artist who humorously examines our hypermodern times, Filipe Vilas-Boas offers a satirical critique of the notion of technological progress while cultivating his own analog and digital poetry. His installations, videos, and performances blend AI and DIY, robotics and philosophy, sociology and literature, astronomy and music.
Filipe Vilas-Boas is an artist born in Portugal in 1981. He lives and works in Ivry. A conceptual artist who explores the porosity between the IRL and URL worlds, his creations combine upcycling, repurposing, and new media. In particular, he explores the possibilities and excesses of the digital world and attempts to bring its ethical and aesthetic implications to life.
A self-taught artist, his practice began in 2008 with network-based interventions in public spaces. That same year, he began exhibiting at venues including the FIT Freie Internationale Tankstelle in Berlin. Starting in 2014, he participated in Nuit Blanche with an interactive starry sky installation inside the Saint-Eustache Church. In 2015, he held his first solo exhibition at the Flaq Gallery in Paris and participated in the Musée Passager. His work was featured in two editions of the book *Portuguese Emerging Art* in 2018 and 2019. He now regularly exhibits his works in France and abroad.
Recently, his installations, videos, and performances have been featured in various artistic and digital events, such as the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence at UNESCO, French Language and Francophonie Week, and the Siana Biennale, the Némo Biennial at the CENTQUATRE and the Musée des Arts et Métiers, the Teatros del Canal in Madrid, the ADAF in Athens, Share in Turin, the Zaratan Gallery, the MAAT Museum in Lisbon, the CCBB Belo Horizonte in Brazil, and the Tate Modern in London.
