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La Vanité is a theatrical installation. A nervous sketching robot stripped down to its bare essentials endlessly draws an updated vanitas. The party is over – the beer is drunk, opium enters the blood vessels and manipulates our neurotransmitters, the voluptuous shell is empty, life is gone. The remnants of ecstasy and trance are traces of former intensity. Life is short. Maybe too short. Maybe the party has been nothing but an attempt to forget, to assimilate life and death. So it is either Roy Beatty’s I want more life, father or Shakespeare’s Life’s but a walking shadow.

The robot here is a little story machine, it is constructed to build stories about humanness. It is not self-contained but dependent on our gaze. Having a soulless robot meditating on our mortality raises numerous candid, existential and meaningless questions. It is an allegory of what has been called our posthuman condition: man’s face finally washed out by the ocean, not recognizable anymore as an important figure of knowledge or merely one of its tropes.

The first installation of the series was premiered at the Creative Machines exhibition at Goldsmiths College, London in 2014. Since, other installations in the series have been exhibited in Gdansk at the Laznia art centre in the solo show Human Traits in 2015, For the Ex Nihilo, Nihil Fit exhibition during Art Brussels in 2016,  during the group show La Robotica in Trieste in 2016, at the Verbeke foundation for the Animal-Man-Machine exhibition, In 2017 in Astana for the Artistes et Robots organised by the french RMN, for the Artistes et Robots exhibition at the Grand Palais (Paris), and at Galerie Antoine in 2019 for the solo show La petite vanité au robot et à la souris, in 2019 at the Kirchner Museum in Davos (CH).