Antoine Schmitt, the French artist who quit Steve Jobs’s NeXT to make a pixel seem alive

Antoine Schmitt

Photo: Rijksmuseum / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1961 Strasbourg
Occupation	Artist
Awards	transmediale Award, second prize · Prix Ars Electronica, Award of Distinction, Digital Musics · Festival International UNESCO de Vidéo-Danse, first prize · Festival Interférences, first prize · medi@terra, first prize

On a wall at Galerie Charlot in Paris this spring, a single white pixel wandered inside a rectangle, slowing almost to a stop, then lurching forward and leaving traces that faded behind it. It drew nothing, and visitors caught themselves wondering why it moved the way it did. That question, what makes a thing behave as if it wanted something, is the one Antoine Schmitt has been putting to audiences for three decades. The arrival of chatbots and image generators has turned his quiet, minimal work from a corner of the media-art circuit into something close to a running commentary on the age.

Schmitt came to art from the other side of the screen. Before he exhibited anything he was a software engineer at NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple, where he built interface tools for developers. He later told France’s national film body, the CNC, that the job had been the height of what he could dream of as a programmer, and that he walked away anyway because he did not like making software whose point was to be useful.

Schmitt was born in Strasbourg in 1961 and taught himself to program at sixteen on the family computer, drawn by the way written text turns into action. He graduated as an engineer from Télécom Paris in 1984 and spent the following years on artificial intelligence and human–machine interaction at the French firm Act Informatique, working on expert systems and neural networks, before his NeXT years in the early nineties. The turn came through painting rather than code. Seeing Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square in Amsterdam was, he has said, a genuine aesthetic shock. Drawing and painting never suited him, so he settled on the material he had handled daily for fifteen years.

The first work that mattered was Le Pixel Blanc, written in 1996 and first shown in July 1998 at the Château de Bionnay. Its behaviour comes from an algorithm Schmitt modelled on his own reading of Freud’s split between the conscious and the unconscious, which is why its hesitations and sudden bursts feel less like animation than temperament. He still calls it probably his strongest piece. Vexation 1, from 2000, sets a ball bouncing around a rectangle in which each wall plays a note. The ball is programmed to move freely and, at the same time, to play the same melody, and the strain between those two orders is the work. The title nods to Erik Satie’s Vexations, a piano piece meant to be played 840 times in a row. It earned an honorary mention for software art at transmediale in Berlin.

Wider recognition came on the festival circuit. Still Living, a series of installations begun in 2006, turns business graphics into organisms: pie charts and bar graphs animated by the very forces they claim to measure. It shared the second prize of the transmediale award in 2007. In the same period Schmitt was designing the behaviour of the Nabaztag, the wi-fi rabbit sold by the French company Violet, and with the composer Jean-Jacques Birgé he turned a hundred of those consumer gadgets into Nabaz’mob, an opera sent over wi-fi to the rabbits’ ears, lights and tiny speakers. At the Prix Ars Electronica in 2009 it was one of the two Awards of Distinction in Digital Musics, behind Bill Fontana’s Golden Nica.

Galerie Charlot has represented him in Paris since 2010, and DAM Projects in Berlin since 2023, when the gallery gave him the solo show Clinamen. His other long partnership is on stage. Since the early 2010s he has made audiovisual concerts with the composer Franck Vigroux, from Tempest, in 2012, where millions of particles stand in for the chaos before form, to ATOTAL, from 2021, which pushes the old dream of the total work of art until it starts to borrow the methods of propaganda. Vigroux plays live while Schmitt generates the images in real time. His works sit in the collections of the city of Paris, Société Générale and Borusan, among others.

For all the talk of pioneering, Schmitt’s own account of his career is strikingly unheroic. “My artworks have not radically changed since I started,” he told the critic Pau Waelder, adding that no really new concept had been born in his field since Alan Turing invented the computer. That consistency is the work’s strength and its limit. It kept him loyal to squares, pixels and bouncing points while fashions passed, but his solo shows have taken place in galleries and regional art centres rather than in a major museum retrospective, and the firsts that circulate about him, such as the first artistic CD-ROM, are hard to check against anything but his own records. His view of the NFT boom shows the same unsentimental streak. He released a series of generative, semi-autonomous NFTs in 2021, along with Buy Me!, a satire of marketing, while saying plainly that “the main new concept behind the NFT market boom was the perspective of financial profit, for collectors and for artists.”

This year the question at the centre of his work became the question of the season. Être Machine (Being Machine), his solo show at Galerie Charlot from April to July 2026, set Le Pixel Blanc beside the Machinimales, sculptures made in 2025 with the intermedia artist Hortense Gauthier, the 10000 Pistes plotters and the Generative Quantum Ballet. The show argued that such simple artificial beings raise the questions generative AI raises, perhaps more directly. Then he put that technology to work inside his own system. For Anne Théron’s play DELETE, which premiered on 9 October 2026 at Le Cube in Garges, he used Tongyi-MAI, an open-source model from Alibaba, to generate figurative images that his algorithms then rework live, so the visuals differ at every performance. In September he toured Taiwan and Hong Kong with Vigroux, and on 13 October the review TINA published his essay Manières d’être artificiel.

He and Vigroux take Cascades to Kinshasa on 7 November, Transdisciplina brings the duo to the Teatro Echegaray in Málaga on 28 November, Videopolis plays Linz on 4 December and Nacht II reaches La Muse en Circuit in Alfortville on 8 December. Ahead lie antiMatter, a show for domes with Vigroux, an audio-reactive work for the annual concert of the Orchestre du Rhin in Strasbourg in June 2027, and a choreographic piece with Jean-Marc Matos and Hortense Gauthier built around an autonomous robot. Schmitt, who lives between Paris and Angoulême, has said that “art is intention and responsibility,” two notions he considers “still unique to humans.” His next machines will put that claim to the test again.

Tags: art, artists, digital art, Antoine Schmitt, Franck Vigroux, ATOTAL, Generative Art