The Alpine A110 Sastruga was presented for the first time last April at the Grand Palais Ephémère, during the Art Paris exhibition, which aims to make contemporary art accessible to a wider public. More recently, on May 25th, it made its road debut before the Monaco Grand Prix, in the hands of Oscar Piastri, reserve driver for the BWT Alpine F1 Team. Obvious was inspired by the prowess of the Alpine teams on different circuits and the undulating movements of the stratuga due to the wind, and thanks to AI, created the covering of the car.

Last year, during the Art Paris show, which took place from September 9 to 12, 2021, Alpine had exhibited a hand-painted A110 S model by the Spanish-Argentine artist Felipe Pantone, who wanted above all “to evoke a feeling of ultra-dynamism”.

This year, it is the Obvious collective that the brand has called to “decorate “ the Alpine A110 Sastruga.

The Obvious collective: working with AI algorithms to create art

This collective, to which we devoted an article in the third issue of our paper magazine Actuia, has three members, childhood friends, who have always had the desire to work together on a creative and innovative project: Pierre Fautrel, Hugo Caselles-Dupré and Gauthier Vernier. Hugo Caselles-Dupré, a researcher in artificial intelligence, discovers GANs, algorithms invented by Ian Goodfellow in 2014 that produced a huge craze in the field of machine learning and made him famous, the collective decides to use them as creative tools.

The three friends, who are art lovers, then decided to create classic portraits using these algorithms that can replicate the creative process. One of their first paintings was bought by the director of the Institute of Artistic Careers (ICART) and collector, Nicolas Laugero Lasserre, which made them known. In 2018, one of their works, the “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy “ estimated at most at 10,000 euros, created a surprise by being sold for $432,500 by the famous American auction house Christie’s. For this painting, the collective trained its algorithm with approximately 15,000 portraits painted between the 15th and 19th centuries. The signature, as for the other paintings produced by Obvious, is a mathematical formula.

They are also behind the ” We are Marianne ” project, which aims to create a portrait of a Marianne that is more representative of French women thanks to GANS.

The Alpine-collective Obvious collaboration

For this covering project, the collective worked with Zouhayr Alami, Data Architect at Alpine, who helped them create systems around the data.

They trained the GAN algorithms on a database of tracks where Alpine has been successful to create an imaginary track representative of the Alpine DNA.

Then they created six-point models of this imaginary track and combined simulations of the air friction during a lap the car would take on it to represent it on the covering. They were inspired by sastruga, a natural phenomenon in which ripples are created by the saltation of snow under the action of the wind.

Finally, they created a canvas based on the decomposition of the elements of the car, transformed it into a topographic map and then into a 3D model of a mountain.

They state:

“Then, the last step is that by flattening the complete covering, it gives a topography, considering that the places where the wind rubbed the most give the peaks of a mountain. “

They didn’t forget to sign their work with a mathematical formula:

“All of our mathematical works are signed with the GAN formula to give the viewer clues about the artistic process used to create them. “

Translated from Focus sur l’Alpine A110 Sastruga, « Awrt Car » fruit d’une collaboration entre Alpine Cars, BWT Alpine F1 Team et le collectif Obvious