we will make you bow to the delicate

aurèce vettier

we will make you bow to the delicate is a sculptural diptych by aurèce vettier, an early work from 2020 composed of two engraved sandstone tablets framed in charred oak. The work blends poetic writing, personal history, and machine-generated language into a visual meditation on fragility and resilience. At its heart lies a speculative alphabet—called Latent Botanist—conceived through the training of GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) on millions of herbarium sheets, many of them from the artist’s native Savoie.

During these experiments, the AI did not only generate impossible flora, but also began producing indecipherable inscriptions—reinterpretations of the handwritten notations and scientific legends that populated the botanical documents. From this unexpected dataset, aurèce vettier manually curated and recomposed a new set of glyphs: a suggestive, ornamental script that occupies a space between asemic writing, botany, and spiritual diagrams.

This artificial alphabet was turned into a functional typeface and used here to inscribe two deeply personal texts: a medical diagnosis describing acute anxiety episodes experienced by the artist, and a poem in which trees speak—delicate yet powerful—to the human world. The verses invite us to kneel before fragility, as if reverence could be offered to a trembling lily pad or a burdened wasp. The work exists in a blurred temporal zone—echoing ancient clay tablets while being born from neural networks—and thus fosters a fluid dialogue between nature, humanity, and artificial intelligence. The result is a quiet yet forceful evocation of care, mystery, and interconnectedness.