“In Nice, summer 2026 offers particularly fertile ground for reflecting on our relationship with image. At Villa Arson, the exhibition *Staring at the Sun* brings together thirty-five young artists until September 27 who question norms, control, intimate narratives and the tensions of the contemporary world. A few months earlier, Hito Steyerl questioned the invisible mechanisms of artificial intelligence there. In the age of avatars, social networks and AI-generated images, an old question thus returns in a new form: who are we when we choose the image we present to others?”
At Villa Arson, a generation faces its era head-on
This summer, contemporary creation in Nice offers an excellent starting point.
Presented at Villa Arson from July 10 to September 27, 2026, *Staring at the Sun*, the exhibition of 2026 graduates, brings together thirty-five young artists around the tensions and paradoxes of our era.
Painting, installation, photography, video, performance or music: the practices are multiple, but several concerns resonate with each other. The works notably question the structures and injunctions that frame our existences, the notions of control and norm, but also the margins, intimate narratives and our relationship with the world.
A panorama that takes on particular resonance at a time when an increasing part of our identity is also constructed through the images we produce and disseminate.
Because our face is no longer only the one we see in a mirror.
It also exists in our profiles, our retouched photographs, our pseudonyms and now in the avatars that artificial intelligence can create on our behalf.
From self-portrait to avatar
For centuries, artists represented themselves.
The self-portrait showed a face, but also allowed the construction of an identity. Clothing, posture, setting, lighting, expression: long before Instagram, the artist was already choosing what they wished to reveal — or conceal.
The digital age has not eliminated this practice. It has multiplied it.
Today, it is possible to have a public existence without ever showing one’s true face. A creator can adopt a pseudonym, modify their voice or appear as an entirely digital character.
The phenomenon of **VTubing** constitutes one of its most remarkable manifestations.
Popularized in Japan from the mid-2010s onward, it consists of a real creator appearing before their audience through an animated avatar.
One of the emblematic figures in this history is **Kizuna AI**, who appeared in 2016 and became one of the figures that contributed to popularizing the term “Virtual YouTuber.”
Behind the avatar lies human performance: speaking, singing, playing, improvising, responding to the audience. But the face the viewer knows is that of the character.
The avatar thus becomes more than a digital disguise. It can become a true public identity.
Artificial intelligence erases a new boundary
Generative artificial intelligence now adds an additional dimension.
It is now possible to produce in seconds a face that never existed, to transform a photograph, to imagine different versions of oneself or to generate images whose realism sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish between photograph and artificial creation.
The question “Who am I on the Internet?” is thus transformed.
**How many versions of myself can I now create?**
For artists, these technologies constitute a new territory for experimentation, but also a critical subject.
And Nice provided a particularly interesting illustration of this this year.
Hito Steyerl: finding the human behind AI
From February 20 to May 31, 2026, Villa Arson presented *Mechanical Kurds*, a video installation by German artist and theorist **Hito Steyerl**.
For over twenty years, her work has questioned the circulation of images, digital technologies and the economic and political systems hidden behind them.
With *Mechanical Kurds*, the artist is particularly interested in invisible chains of micro-work and the human mechanisms concealed behind technologies that are willingly presented as “autonomous.”
The title references the famous “Mechanical Turk,” that 18th-century chess-playing automaton that seemed capable of playing on its own while a human was secretly hidden inside the machine.
Transposed to the age of artificial intelligence, the metaphor becomes particularly effective.
Behind the algorithms and the apparent autonomy of machines are always infrastructures, workers, human choices and power relations.
The exhibition thus reminded us that talking about artificial intelligence is not only about talking about technology: it is also about talking about those who make it, the images it produces and the world it helps shape.
Literature had already invented our doubles
Long before digital avatars, writers knew the power of multiple identities.
Pseudonyms, doubles, uncertain narrators, characters who change names: literature has never stopped playing with the question of identity.
In Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*, beings change form, becoming animals, plants or natural elements. Physical transformation becomes a way of recounting desire, fear, flight or punishment.
Much closer to us, Paul Auster plays in *The New York Trilogy* with names, doubles, writers and detectives until the boundary between observer and observed becomes uncertain.
Our digital avatars extend in a certain way this ancient fascination.
With one fundamental difference: these alternative identities are no longer reserved for fictional characters.
We can now create them ourselves.
Nice, an artistic laboratory long before the digital age
These questions are ultimately not foreign to Nice’s artistic history.
The city was long a laboratory where artists challenged the traditional boundaries of the work of art.
**Yves Klein** naturally constitutes one of the most emblematic examples.
With his blue that became immediately identifiable, his *Anthropometries* or his research into the immaterial, Klein did not merely produce objects. He constructed a language, an experience and an artistic universe.
His *Anthropometries*, created by using the body as an instrument of creation, take on particular resonance today.
At a time when we can artificially generate bodies that do not exist, Klein brutally reminds us of physical presence: a body, a gesture, an imprint.
The image then arises not from the disappearance of the body, but from its trace.
Vallauris and Picasso: transforming to represent
The same questioning can arise in a field seemingly far removed from the digital: ceramics.
On the Côte d’Azur, it naturally leads to Vallauris.
Picasso discovers after World War II the extraordinary possibilities offered by clay and works for several years with local craftsmen.
Plates, pitchers and vases gradually become faces, animals or human figures.
The artist no longer merely decorates the object: he exploits its form to give it a new identity.
A pitcher can become a body. A plate can become a face.
This ability to look at a form and imagine what it could become possesses something remarkably contemporary.
The tool has changed, but the principle of transformation remains at the heart of the creative gesture.
“Become what you are”: from Pindar to Nietzsche
Philosophy allows us to go a bit further.
A famous formula runs through Nietzsche’s work: **”Become what you are.”**
The philosopher here takes up a thought whose origin goes back to the Greek poet **Pindar**, before making it notably the subtitle of *Ecce Homo*: *How One Becomes What One Is*.
The formula seems, however, to have been written for our era.
What does it mean to become oneself when we can continually modify the image we present to others?
Is identity something we discover or something we construct?
From this angle, the avatar is not necessarily a concealment.
It can also constitute a ground for experimentation: choosing another appearance, speaking differently, trying on a character, revealing a facet of oneself difficult to express in the physical world.
The mask does not always serve to hide.
Sometimes it allows us to show something.
We have all become creators of our own image
This is perhaps where the digital revolution is most profound.
Building a public image was once primarily the affair of artists, writers, sovereigns, actors or known personalities.
Today, billions of people have their own space for representation.
A photograph chosen over another, a few words in a biography, a pseudonym, a filter, a video or an avatar all participate in this construction.
We have become simultaneously model, photographer, director and broadcaster of our own image.
And artificial intelligence now offers us a new tool: the possibility of producing representations of ourselves that have sometimes never existed in the physical world.
This is where art becomes valuable again.
Not necessarily because it provides an answer, but because it teaches us to look at images with greater distance.
In Nice, art invites us to look differently
This is also what makes the current program at Villa Arson particularly interesting.
*Staring at the Sun* is not an exhibition specifically devoted to avatars or artificial intelligence. Rather, it bears witness to the preoccupations of a generation confronted with the norms, injunctions, tensions and narratives of the contemporary world.
A few months earlier, Hito Steyerl’s *Mechanical Kurds* directly questioned the invisible infrastructures of AI and the images produced in the era of digital capitalism.
Put in perspective with the artistic history of Nice and the Côte d’Azur, these proposals show how radically different practices can continue to dialogue.
A Klein *Anthropometry*, a Picasso ceramic, a Paul Auster literary character, a Japanese VTuber and an AI-generated avatar seem to belong to incompatible worlds.
Yet all confront us with the relationship between **body, image and identity**.
Behind the avatar, who do we want to become?
We have probably never produced so many images of ourselves.
We photograph them, select them, retouch them, publish them and now we can ask artificial intelligence to reinvent them.
The avatar seems to belong to the future. Yet it extends a much older history made of portraits, masks, pseudonyms, doubles and metamorphoses.
What changes today is that this possibility no longer belongs only to artists.
It is in everyone’s hands.
This summer in Nice, the works presented at Villa Arson invite us precisely to look at our era without detour. Perhaps it is also an opportunity to turn the question back toward our own screens.
**When we choose an image, a profile or an avatar to represent ourselves, do we show what we are — or do we already begin to become what we have chosen to be?**
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