Velasquez the aristopunk robot and his avatars. Special version for Shenzhen exhibition by Wisdom in septembre 2023 This painting of which we are the heroes, is a mise en abîme of the mise en abîme of Vélasquez, with its play of mirrors which, by a conceptual trick, projects us on a journey through time in the Alcazar palace with the family of the King of Spain, thanks to the play of mirrors but also thanks to the immersive properties of the rules of Renaissance perspective. The original painting by Velasquez is an immersive game that is the precursor of our metaverses, and of which we become the heroes. Thus, like Velasquez who, according to the rules of Renaissance perspective, opens a trompe-l'oeil virtual window overlooking a cyberspace precursor to our video games, this reinterpretation of Las Meninas in augmented reality opens a temporal space tunnel between the past and our future populated by artificial intelligences whose nøøalgorithmic avatars gradually contaminate the painting, in the immaterial digital space.

In this selfie before the hour that is the original painting of Las Meninas, Velasquez, (who, by derogation from the Pope has just been ennobled), paints himself in an ostentatious and provocative way, with the sword reserved for the nobility, and painted on its breastplate, the emblem of the highest order of nobility in Spain, the Order of Santiago. The original painting of Las Meninas is a "fuck" for the Spanish court, which refused to ennoble Velasquez. Thus, Velasquez Aristopunk, with the complicity of the king, freed himself from his status as a worker and servant of the aristocracy. He went from being a robot/slave to being a master. In this contemporary allegorical interpretation of the painting where Velasquez in the original version, provocatively describes his emancipation from the status of worker to that of aristocrat, I describes our own collective hope for contemporary emancipation, thanks to the robotic domesticity of which we surround, but whose cybernetic multitude ends up enslaving us. (just as the aristocracy of past centuries was enslaved by its own servants). This composition is also a transposition of the Alcazar Palace in the metaverses of contemporary video games, with their myriads of avatars. The spectator no longer projects himself only in the King and Queen of Spain, but also in all the avatars present in the scene. The scene describes a virtual Alcazar Palace reconstructed in a metaverse like Second Life, and in which the avatars of the famous Arnolfini spouses from Van Eyck's painting come in gyrodine to visit the avatars of the family of the King of Spain in cyberpunk version. All characters were created with the large language model generative art application Midjourney. The exterior decor on the left of the painting is the universe of the flying rocks of the Reefs. A virtual cosmogony in which Yann Minh traveled, through the synesthetic visions of his childhood, by what is now called the “shifting”. Reefs have been present in most of his graphic and literary works for fifty years. In the background, at the top of the flying rock, is a Chappe telegraph, which was one of the first aerial networks for transmitting information, a precursor to digital networks. An NFT version of the table is available on the OBJKT site https://objkt.com/collection/KT1JbU5iPa2QYi2xSmidVUY3iV5VjMct2WZm