Patrick Tresset (French, b. 1967) designs robots that draw and paint human sitters in live performances, examining the differences between human and mechanical execution.,He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium, having trained first as a painter before studying computational art at Goldsmiths, University of London.,,His Human Studies series explores vanitas, boredom and conformismthrough robots that observe and portray their sitters.
Tresset moved to London in the early 1990s to work as a painter, but grew frustrated with his own work, saying he had lost the spontaneity in his painting.He later joined Goldsmiths, University of London as a mature student, and during his doctoral studies there built his first robotic drawing system in 2009, exhibiting it for the first time at the “Kinetica Art Fair” in 2010.,His debut project, Human Study #1, has a sitter remain still for about twenty minuteswhile three robots, each drawing in a different style, observe and portray them.,Tresset describes the machines' abilities as “non-intelligent”. Their behavior only appears self-directed: it is bound to a restricted set of programmed actions and to each robot's physical form.
In 2016 Tresset collaborated with Goshka Macuga on Before the Beginning and After the End, a monumental installation in which two robots plotted drawings onto long scrolls during live performances,first shown at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.The work was later included in the “New Humans: Memories of the Future” exhibition at the New Museum in New York.His drawings are held in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection in London,,and his installations have been exhibited at institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Fondazione Prada in Milan and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul.,
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as his exhibition schedule shrank from eighteen shows in 2019 to a handful by 2021, Tresset began minting his robot-made drawings as NFTs on Tezos, first through Hic et Nunc.With Diane Drubay, he founded alterHEN, a Tezos-based online art gallerybuilt as a platform for curation and experimentation.In the mid-2020s Tresset extended his drawing systems into agentic installations built with large language models.One such work, Skediama, premiered during a solo show at the Festival d'Avignon's Grenier à Sel in July 2026, where it gave 183 performances and conversed with participants in seven languages.,
