Artificial Intelligence

In this new body of work, ORLAN uses artificial intelligence to create self-portraits conceived as true manifestos. Her eyes are bulging and her mouth is screaming, baring her teeth, ready to bite so that her anger is expressed as an extension of the Women who cry are angry (2019), in which she blended with Pablo Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar crying. ORLAN revives an iconography marked by suffering to infuse it with a political and contemporary interpretation, transforming tears into an expression of rebellion and resistance.

ORLAN is deeply distressed by what is currently happening in the world: the rise of the far right, totalitarianism, masculinism, racism, and religious extremism; the multitude of wars; and the growing dominance of the dictates of force, power, and money.

To make this process of emancipation tangible, ORLAN gives concrete form to its various stages, conceiving this series as an evolving project. The first image, generated entirely by artificial intelligence, is deliberately left untouched. It serves as a starting point, a kind of raw analysis of the machine’s capabilities, revealing both its potential and its limitations in image generation.

Gradually, ORLAN reworks, alters, and transforms the AI-generated images through painting. A dialogue emerges between the digital gesture and the human gesture, between algorithmic automatism and artistic intention, coexisting within the same space-time.  

Throughout the series, painting takes center stage. It becomes a symbol of a “reclaiming of control” that is both emotional and political, marking the assertion of the subject. This shift from the digital to the pictorial demonstrates the freedom with which ORLAN creates, moving from one medium to another without betraying herself.

The series concludes with a painting created entirely by ORLAN. This final gesture affirms total emancipation: that of a body, a voice, and an image that have been fully reclaimed.

Currently, ORLAN is blending ARTistic Intelligence and ARTificial Intelligence. 

Léo Blondel created Alias, an innovative personal AI generation platform designed to generate artworks based on ORLAN’s series. Alias is a space where you can transform your real-world artistic expression into unique generative AI models, each known as an “Alias.”  

Thanks to this personal AI, ORLAN can reinterpret her previous series through a new lens, situating them within the new social phenomenon of AI.
The public can purchase credits to generate images, which calls into question the status of the viewer, the artist, and the artwork. 

The viewer no longer creates the work; instead, they become part of the work itself.
This ORLAN-esque generative AI allows the public to create images based on a specific corpus and protocol established by ORLAN, making the creative process interactive and bringing to life the “we are” expressed by ORLAN in place of “I am.” 

The result is five new series currently in progress.

ORLAN decided to create geometric abstract works (1971–1974), which she painted with a spray gun on white laminate using masking techniques to produce extremely glossy pieces, lacquered like a mirror in which the audience is reflected.

In contrast to the artistic practices of her time, ORLAN wanted to create works without using a paintbrush—a tool so common, so traditional, so often used by men to depict the body, movement, and material! 

It is geometric, industrial abstract painting—without brushstrokes, without thick paint, without “fine brushwork.” There isn’t the slightest trace of the body, yet it is still the viewer who completes the work! When the viewer walks by and observes the painting, they can simultaneously see themselves reflected in it.

The body is there, as if frozen in place; the viewers are inside the artwork!

The artwork becomes a mirror for them, physically incorporating the viewer’s presence into the work. 

In 2025, ORLAN reexamines painting within the context of today’s creative practices and tools. She embraces digital technology to explore new ways of “painting.”

Generative AI allows him to break down the barriers between the old and the new, between traditional craftsmanship and new media. 

She presents these works on a reflective screen, drawing on her principle of incorporating the body of “the other.”

ORLAN, 2025.

This imagination is reactivated by Baroque folds and by Bernini, whom ORLAN encountered during a study trip to Italy, where she took away this lesson from the Baroque: it does not ask us to choose between good “or” evil, as the Judeo-Christian religion does. She shows us Bernini’s Saint Teresa, who revels in the angel’s dart in an erotic “and” ecstatic ecstasy. Lacan spoke at length about this.  

From her very first experiments with the sheets from her trousseau, ORLAN has been fascinated by folds and has explored the interplay of light and shadow.

She has created numerous series of drapery studies—photographs of folds that form part of a documentary study: *Drapé-le Baroque*. ORLAN stages close-ups of drapery made from linens from a bridal trousseau, very often featuring organic shapes, curves and counter-curves, vulvas…

In 2012, she created a series titled Plis Mouvants in which she features computer-generated Baroque drapery as a continuation of her exploration of the Baroque. This series of 36 works was produced as lenticular prints, which create a sense of movement and cause the folds to shift depending on the viewer’s position.  

In 2025, ORLAN takes its process a step further by using generative AI to create new baroque folds and drapery—entirely produced by the machine and displayed on screen. The old and the new, the historical and the contemporary, come together, breaking down the walls of ice that separate them.  

ORLAN, 2025.

ORLAN has traveled extensively throughout her life to understand the world and to combat ethnocentrism. She does not travel as a tourist but as a researcher. Her works are the result of her studies, her travels, and her self-reflection.  

Using the computer, ORLAN blends her work with sculptures, photographs, and paintings from other civilizations she admires to create a new vision, a new kind of beauty. Hybridization isn’t just 1 + 1; it’s the idea that the combined forces of the two create something greater—a third force that would not have existed without the other two.

The first hybridization is the DNA sequencing of a woman and a man, and throughout our lives we never stop hybridizing with what we read, the people we meet, our experiences, and changes in our environment… 

In 2025, ORLAN reexamines this relationship with the “other.” The “other” is always wrong simply for being “other.” Beyond its alluring exoticism, it evokes our fear of the unknown.

Who is “the other” in our contemporary society? Who is this person we are meant to discover and meet?

The “self” is a fiction created by others. 

ORLAN says “we are” instead of “I am.” 

It blends with what the machine is capable of generating. Another artificial entity that exists only in digital pixels.

A human body merges with a digital body. This is my body…this is my software.

Somewhere between fiction and reality, its source is, for the first time, unnameable: it is the result of a prompt, of an algorithm, because “in the beginning was the Word”!

ORLAN, 2025.

ORLAN creates very “abrupt” digital collages into which she inserts fragments of her face: her bulging eyes, her crooked nose, her upside-down ear, her bumps—symbols of her emancipation—and her screaming mouth, baring teeth ready to bite, so that anger is expressed in the work like a snapshot of that moment of realization when everything shifts from “enduring” to Action!

ORLAN does not put Pablo Picasso or Dora Maar on trial—since they can no longer defend themselves—but rather speaks to the women who remain in the shadows: the inspirers, the models, the muses who played a pivotal role in the fame of our great masters. It is a call to empowerment. ORLAN speaks to the women of today who fade into the background. She tells them, “Stop being objects; become subjects. Empower yourselves; stop enduring; stop crying. Speak up and be heard. Make your voice heard, and have something to say, something to stand for.”  

In 2025, ORLAN is inconsolable. She feels that her life has been in vain because, after some progress and hope, everything is closing in on women again.

That is why her manifesto is clear: this series—a work in progress—will not be concluded as long as there are women being discriminated against, harassed, raped, beaten, killed… Even after her death, the protocol created by ORLAN using this generative AI will ensure that her fight continues and that women who are crying will stop crying and become angry, that women will win, and that this terrible “apartheid” will end!

ORLAN, 2025.

ORLAN portrays herself as both a white virgin and a black virgin being assumed into heaven on a video screen displaying digital images of our time, while referencing Baroque marble sculptures.

In this series, ORLAN emphasizes that there is no dichotomy between today’s digital images and the images of folded sculptures quoting Bernini.

It is constructed on real building materials—concrete blocks—while the background of the work consists of imitation plastic bricks painted yellow; thus, the real and the fake coexist without conflicting. 

In 2025, the artist puts this lesson into perspective by generating new images through the machine, which reaffirms this Baroque lesson by bringing together the past “and” the present, depicting different times within the same space.

The White Virgin and the Black Virgin are draped in faux leather, a material that, when lit, resembles marble and evokes Baroque drapery. She holds a number of accessories, such as white and black crosses, and white and black easels.

She has blended religious vocabulary with secular visual vocabulary to highlight the underlying sensuality of religious iconography, drawing on the lesson of the Baroque, which does not ask us to choose between good “or” evil, as the Judeo-Christian religion does. Bernini shows us Saint Teresa experiencing ecstasy from the angel’s arrow in a state that is both erotic “and” ecstatic. Lacan spoke at length about this, and ORLAN has built her works and theoretical reflections around this “and.”

ORLAN, 2025.