Grand Palais, Paris — 13 February 2018
Muses Endormies
The First AI-Generated Figurative Artwork Ever Sold
Grand Palais, Paris — 13 February 2018
The First AI-Generated Figurative Artwork Ever Sold
Zoom out: From components to artwork
Muses Endormies (4/7)
The Artwork
Assembled in July 2017 and first sold at the Grand Palais on 13 February 2018, Muses Endormies (Sleeping Muses) is a monumental photographic mosaic composed entirely of AI-generated faces — the Children of the Cloud. Each of the 4,368 portraits was hallucinated by a Generative Adversarial Network trained on 1001 real faces captured by ALAgrApHY between 2011 and 2016 — painting a portrait of humanity in all its diversity, where the precise hue and brightness of each "pixel" was essential to do the muse justice.
The sale preceded Christie's widely-publicised AI art auction by six months. While computer art had existed for decades — notably Harold Cohen's AARON, which utilized rule-based algorithms rather than the generative neural networks we define as AI today — the landscape shifted with the advent of deep learning. In 2016, Google's Deep Dream brought AI art into the public eye, culminating in high-profile auctions; however, these works remained largely abstract.
By creating Muses Endormies, ALAgrApHY pioneered the transition to figurative AI art, producing one of the first and most significant works where machine intelligence was used to represent the human form with intentionality and precision. Each of the 7 limited editions contains the full 4,368 AI-generated portraits, making this not merely a work of art, but a record of a historical moment in the relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence.
Material: Aluminum
Weight: 5 kgs
Dimensions: 100x140x0.3 cms
Proof of authenticity: Available
Material: Aluminum
Weight: 5 kgs
Dimensions: 100x140x0.3 cms
Proof of authenticity: Available
The Series
The Children of the Cloud is ALAgrApHY's foundational AI series — thousands of unique, AI-generated portraits of people who do not exist, of all origins, genders and ages. Generated in 2016 using deep-learning GANs trained on real photographic subjects, this corpus gave rise to two landmark exhibited series.
Series I · 2017–2018
4 of 7 copies remainingThe sleeping muses — a monumental mosaic of 4,368 AI-generated faces assembled into figurative form. First sold at the Grand Palais, February 2018. One copy belongs to French national heritage.
More about AI Art History →Series II · 2018 · Digital Art Award
5 of 7 copies remainingSmiling ladies, smiling souls — an AI mosaic of joyful, diverse faces drawn from the same generative corpus. Awarded the Prix Art Numérique at the Salon d'Automne 2018 at the Grand Palais — the same salon where Picasso debuted and where Cubism was born.
View series →About the Artist
Links
alahay.org links.alagraphy.com Instagram @alagraphie Instagram @extropart Twitter / X @alagraphy Facebook LinkedIn MediumALAgrApHY is a Paris-based artist-scientist — painter, photographer, filmmaker, and holder of a PhD in Complex Systems — who has been teaching machines to create since 2011. Working across generative and algorithmic art before pioneering the use of deep-learning GANs for figurative art in 2016, he built the Children of the Cloud: thousands of AI-generated portraits of all origins, ages, and genders, trained on real faces he captured for his 1001 Faces project.
His AI figurative artworks were exhibited and sold at the Grand Palais in February 2018, months before Christie's made global headlines with what was widely — and incorrectly — reported as the "first" AI art auction. Awards include the Digital Art Prize at the Salon d'Automne 2018 and the ISCB Art Science Prize. Collaborations span UNESCO, the Mairie de Paris, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Solo exhibitions include ARTificial Intelligence at 40 rue de Rivoli (Nov–Dec 2019), and an AI olfactory art installation at 59 rue de Rivoli. The Mayor of Paris exhibited his work in large format on the streets of the city; several installations remain permanently in place.
Since 2025, ALAgrApHY is the curator of extropART — a group of art/tech avant-gardists exhibiting at Salon Comparaisons at the Grand Palais.
Related Reference
Watch on YouTube →Press
France Info · Culture & Arts
"ALAgrApHY au Grand Palais — une mosaïque photographique créée par intelligence artificielle"
France Info covered ALAgrApHY's landmark exhibition at the Grand Palais, describing the monumental AI-generated photographic mosaic and its place in the emerging dialogue between artificial intelligence and figurative art. The piece preceded the global AI art conversation by months.
Read the full article on France Info →Acquire
With only 4 editions of Muses Endormies and 5 of Dames Souriantes remaining, each acquisition represents both an art historical document and a long-term cultural investment.