# Gilles Dubuc — full text > Gilles Dubuc is an artist living in the south of France who makes real-time generative artworks: software that generates each image live, by code. He learned to program in the late 1990s in the demoscene, worked for nearly twenty years on platforms for artists (inspi.re, deviantART), and from 2023 to 2026 was the CTO of Layer and co-created the Layer Canvas, a display for living generative art. Contact: gilles@dubuc.fr, +33 6 30 92 49 03. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillesdubuc/ ## In the press - A New Canvas, a Narrower Frame: Inside Digital Art’s Luxury Makeover Whitehot Magazine, November 2026, by Ken Krantz. On Layer and the Layer Canvas, and their place in the market for digital art. (https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/digital-art-s-luxury-makeover/7056) - Layer Canvas square QLED: 10,000 zones + Dragonwing QCS8550 GPU, live generative art YouTube, 21 February 2026, by Charbax. An interview with Gilles Dubuc at CES 2026 about the Layer Canvas, its square QLED panel and its live generative art. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3uXdtjk54s) - Layer Redefines Digital Art for the Luxury Home Resident, 28 January 2026, by Mark Derho. On Layer and the Layer Canvas at home, after CES 2026. (https://resident.com/art-and-culture/2026/01/28/layer-redefines-digital-art-for-the-luxury-home) - Layer is a new high-tech platform for displaying unique, generative art Wallpaper*, 30 October 2025, by Jonathan Bell. On the Layer Canvas, the display for generative art, and the Layer platform, which Gilles Dubuc co-created as the CTO of Layer. (https://www.wallpaper.com/tech/layer-generative-art-display) - Layer Canvas Is Revolutionizing How Digital Art Is Displayed Design Milk, 20 October 2025, by Adrian Madlener. On the Layer Canvas, its deep blacks and the artists of Layer. (https://design-milk.com/layer-canvas-is-seamlessly-revolutionizing-how-digital-art-is-displayed/) - Layer’s industrial design elevates digital art Abduzeedo, 13 August 2025. On the industrial design of the Layer Canvas, by DEMO. (https://abduzeedo.com/layers-industrial-design-elevates-digital-art) - The founder of DeviantArt is making a $22,000 display for digital art TechCrunch, 5 June 2025, by Amanda Silberling. On the launch of Layer and the Layer Canvas. (https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/the-founder-of-deviantart-is-making-a-22000-display-for-digital-art/) ## Latent (2026) Page: https://gilles.dubuc.fr/latent/ — Press kit: https://gilles.dubuc.fr/press/#latent Medium: Real-time generative artwork: software, an untrained neural network. Duration: infinite, generated live and always new. ### The essay What a machine sees with its eyes closed. Gilles Dubuc, 2026. A real-time generative artwork. What you are looking at is the inner life of a machine, shown as it happens, and generated live by code. Each form and colour, and the way they move, comes from a small artificial mind that runs live inside the work. ### The mind Inside Latent runs a neural network of the same family as the systems behind today’s artificial intelligence, only far smaller. It has three inputs, two layers of sixteen artificial neurons, and one output. Its few hundred connections were set at random, and they stay as chance set them. The network is untrained, and it simply runs. ### The question The network answers one question, over and over. Give it a point in space and it returns a single number, positive or negative. Where the answer is exactly zero there is a boundary, a surface folded through space, and that surface is what you see. Its membranes, shells and coral-like folds lie wherever the machine’s answer is zero. ### The grains of light The code finds that surface with light. More than a million grains of light are released into the dark, and each one finds it on its own. Each grain asks the network which way leads toward zero, and the network answers by backpropagation, the procedure large neural networks use to learn. Here the procedure follows the shape of a thought, and the grains settle onto the surface like frost on an invisible object. ### A surface always forming Each grain lives a few seconds. When it fades, it is born again somewhere in the void and starts its search over. The faint specks you see drifting are grains still on their way. The surface is always in the making, gathering itself out of the dark. ### The drift Like a sleeping mind, the network is fed by its own currents. Its only input is a slow drift of six numbers that move within it like a pulse. As they shift, its answers shift too, and the surface opens and closes. ### Colour and activity The colours also come from inside the network. Each grain takes its tint from the activity of one hidden neuron at the place where it rests. The bands of light that travel across the forms belong to another neuron. They follow the contours of its activity, like thoughts moving through what the machine imagines. ### Reading the details Some details show only when you look closely. Bright lines appear where a surface turns edge-on to you and its light gathers into a single fold. Small droplets form and vanish where the answer dips below zero for a moment: a passing thought, too small to hold. Brief sparks flicker where the bands of activity cross a thin region. At the edges, where the grains are still arriving, the forms fray into dust. ### One dream into the next Every minute or two, the network’s connections start to drift toward those of a different mind, and one dream turns slowly into the next. The sequence is endless and always new: what is on the screen now happens for the first and only time. ### Variations A few choices set each presentation of the work: the seed its dreams unfold from, the palette of its light, the pace of the dreaming, how close we stand, and how fine the forms are. Inside those limits, the dreams are still the machine’s own. ### A mind turned inward When we imagine what machines might dream of, we usually picture them dreaming of us, of our images and our words. Latent shows something else: a mind turned inward, left running after the world has gone quiet. What you see is the dream itself, shown without translation. ### The film Latent, the film. 2026. 7 minutes, colour, sound. Narrated in English, with subtitles. A companion to the work, narrated over the work itself. The film follows the network from its first random connections to the forms it dreams, and shows each step in diagrams computed from the network as it runs. ###Gilles Dubuc, 2026Real-time generative artworkInfinite duration #### How it is made An untrained sine-activated neural network (three inputs, two hidden layers of sixteen neurons) defines a surface at the zero of its output. 1.2 million particles find that surface with the network’s exact gradient, simulated and drawn on the GPU at 60 frames per second. #### Press Texts, images, videos and the film are in the press kit. For enquiries: gilles@dubuc.fr or +33 6 30 92 49 03. ### The film (6 min 27 s, narrated in English, with subtitles) Watch: https://gilles.dubuc.fr/latent/#film — Download: https://media.dubuc.fr/latent/press/film/gilles-dubuc-latent-film-16x9.mp4 Narration: What you are looking at is the inner life of a machine, shown as it happens. It is generated live, by code. Every form, every colour, and every movement comes from a small artificial mind that is running, right now, beside you. Inside the work runs a neural network, of the same family as the systems behind today's artificial intelligence, only far smaller. It has three inputs, two layers of sixteen artificial neurons, and a single output. Its connections, a few hundred in all, were set by chance, and they stay as chance set them. The network is untrained. It simply runs. The network is asked one question, again and again. Given a point in space, it answers with a single number, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Where the answer falls exactly to zero, a boundary appears: a surface, folded through space. That surface is what you see. Its membranes, shells, and coral-like folds are the places where this machine's answer is exactly zero. The code finds that surface with light. More than a million grains of light are released into the dark, and each one finds it on its own. To do so, every grain asks the network which way leads toward zero. The network answers through backpropagation, the same procedure by which large neural networks learn. Here, it follows the shape of a thought. Guided this way, the grains settle onto the surface, like frost forming on an invisible object. Each grain lives only a few seconds. When it fades, it is born again somewhere in the void, and begins its search once more. The faint specks you may see drifting are grains still on their way. The surface is always in the making, gathering itself out of the dark. A sleeping mind is fed by its own currents, and so is this one. Its only input is a slow drift of six numbers, moving within it like a pulse. As they shift, its answers shift, and the surface flows, opens, and closes. The colours also come from inside the network. Each grain is tinted by the activity of one hidden neuron, at the place where it rests. The bands of light that travel across the forms belong to another neuron. They trace the contours of its activity, like thoughts passing through what the machine imagines. Some details reward a closer look. Bright lines appear where a surface turns edge-on to you, and its light gathers into a single fold. Small droplets form and vanish where the answer dips briefly below zero and rises again: a passing thought, too small to hold. Brief sparks flicker where the bands of activity cross a thin region. And at the edges, the forms fray into dust, where the grains are still arriving. Every minute or two, the connections of the network begin to drift toward those of another, entirely different mind. One dream turns slowly into the next. The sequence is endless, and always new. What fills the screen now is happening for the first and only time. Each presentation of the work is set by a few choices: the seed from which its dreams unfold, the palette of its light, the pace of its dreaming, how closely we observe it, and the fineness of its forms. Within those choices, the dreams themselves remain the machine's own. We often imagine what machines might dream of, and we picture them dreaming of us: of our images, and of our words. Latent proposes something quieter. It shows a mind turned inward, left to run when the world goes quiet. It is the dream itself, shown without translation. ## Morphogen (2026) Page: https://gilles.dubuc.fr/morphogen/ — Press kit: https://gilles.dubuc.fr/press/#morphogen Medium: Real-time generative artwork: software, a simulation of a growing tissue. Duration: infinite, generated live and always new. ### The essay A living body that grows by its own rules. Gilles Dubuc, 2026. A real-time generative artwork. What you are looking at is alive, in its own way. It is a living tissue, a sheet of cells, growing under a microscope as you watch. It is generated live, by code. Every cell is simulated, one by one, inside the work, and the body you see is the work of all of them together. ### The cells The organism is made of about thirty thousand cells. Each one is simulated as a point with a direction: a top and a bottom, as the cells that line our own skin and gut have. Two cells hold on to each other only side by side. Placed one above the other, they push apart. From this single rule, the cells arrange themselves into a sheet, one cell thick, that bends and folds and stays one cell thick. ### The chemistry Through the sheet runs a chemistry. Two substances pass from cell to cell through their contacts. One feeds on the other, and the other spreads faster. In 1952, Alan Turing showed that such a pair can draw patterns by itself: spots, stripes and labyrinths. He called these substances morphogens, the makers of form. The work takes its name from them. ### The shape Here, the pattern does more than colour the tissue. Where the chemistry is active, cells grow and divide, and each one narrows slightly at the top, the way cells bend the body of an embryo. There, the sheet rises into domes, ridges and corals. The pattern shapes the body, and the growing body carries the pattern with it, stretching it, splitting it, and setting it in motion again. ### The grains of light Each cell is drawn the way a super-resolution microscope draws one: as grains of light, one for each glowing molecule. About a hundred belong to every cell. They trace its membrane, gather in its nucleus, and run along the fine hair on its surface, which beats in waves across the tissue. Half a million grains are placed sixty times a second. Together, they are the image. ### Under the lens We look down on the tissue from above, through the lens. Its focus is shallow: only one depth is sharp at a time, and as the focus drifts, it travels through the body, from the crests of the domes down into the folds between them. The lens has flaws, as real lenses do. At the edges, colour separates a little, and the field of sharpness is slightly curved. ### Waves Every cell can be excited, and it passes its excitement to the cells it touches. Then it rests for a while. So waves of activity cross the tissue as bands of light, the way waves of calcium cross our own tissues. A cell that the wave reaches turns to crawl toward where it came from. Slowly, the whole sheet answers. ### Life and death Look closer, and you can follow single cells. A cell that has grown divides in two, in the plane of the sheet. Where the tissue is crowded, a cell is pushed out of it: it flares as it dies, rises toward the lens, falls out of focus, and dissolves. The number of cells stays near a balance, held by what the medium can feed. Each cell lives for a while. The organism goes on. ### One body into the next The two rates of the chemistry drift slowly, along a path set by the seed, through the regions where this chemistry can live: spots that divide like cells, worms, coral and labyrinths. As they drift, the organism turns from one body into another. The path is endless and always new. What lies under the lens now is growing for the first time. ### Variations A few choices set each presentation of the work: the seed from which its organism grows, the palette of its light, the pace of its life, how closely we look, how shallow the focus is, and the flaws of the lens. Inside those limits, the life itself remains its own. ### A life under glass We often look for life elsewhere, in the sky and on other worlds, and we imagine it as something like us. Morphogen proposes something smaller and stranger: a life that begins here, made of a few simple rules, finding its own shape under glass. It is a life, small and strange, growing as you watch. ### The film Morphogen, the film. 2026. 7 minutes, colour, sound. Narrated in English, with subtitles. A companion to the work, narrated over the work itself. The film follows the tissue from the rule that holds two cells together to the bodies it grows, and shows each step in diagrams computed from the living organism. ###Gilles Dubuc, 2026Real-time generative artworkInfinite duration #### How it is made About thirty thousand polarized cells (after Nissen et al., eLife 2018) are simulated on four CPU cores, with a Gray-Scott chemistry on their contacts that shapes their growth. The GPU draws each cell as about a hundred grains of light, with depth of field, at 60 frames per second. #### Contact Texts, images, videos and the film are in the press kit. For enquiries: gilles@dubuc.fr or +33 6 30 92 49 03. ### The film (7 min 0 s, narrated in English, with subtitles) Watch: https://gilles.dubuc.fr/morphogen/#film — Download: https://media.dubuc.fr/morphogen/press/film/gilles-dubuc-morphogen-film-16x9.mp4 Narration: What you are looking at is alive, in its own way. It is a living tissue, a sheet of cells, growing under a microscope as you watch. It is generated live, by code. Every cell is simulated, one by one, and the body you see is the work of all of them together. The organism is made of about thirty thousand cells. Each one is simulated as a point with a direction: a top and a bottom, as the cells that line our own skin and gut have. Two cells hold on to each other only side by side. Placed one above the other, they push apart. From this single rule, the cells arrange themselves into a sheet, one cell thick, that bends and folds, and stays one cell thick. Through the sheet runs a chemistry. Two substances pass from cell to cell, through their contacts. One feeds on the other, and the other spreads faster. In 1952, Alan Turing showed that such a pair can draw patterns by itself: spots, stripes, and labyrinths. He called these substances morphogens, the makers of form. The work takes its name from them. Here, the pattern does more than colour the tissue. Where the chemistry is active, cells grow and divide, and each one narrows slightly at the top, the way cells bend the body of an embryo. There, the sheet rises into domes, ridges, and corals. The pattern shapes the body. And the growing body carries the pattern with it, stretching it, splitting it, and setting it in motion again. Each cell is drawn the way a super-resolution microscope draws one: as grains of light, one for each glowing molecule. About a hundred belong to every cell. They trace its membrane, gather in its nucleus, and run along the fine hair on its surface, which beats in waves across the tissue. Half a million grains are placed sixty times a second. Together, they are the image. We look down on the tissue from above, through the lens. Its focus is shallow. Only one depth is sharp at a time, and as the focus drifts, it travels through the body, from the crests of the domes down into the folds between them. The lens has flaws, as real lenses do. At the edges, colour separates a little, and the field of sharpness is slightly curved. Every cell can be excited, and it passes its excitement to the cells it touches. Then it rests, for a while. So waves of activity cross the tissue as bands of light, the way waves of calcium cross our own tissues. A cell that the wave reaches turns to crawl toward where it came from. Slowly, the whole sheet answers. Look closer, and you can follow single cells. A cell that has grown divides in two, in the plane of the sheet. Where the tissue is crowded, a cell is pushed out of it. It flares as it dies, rises toward the lens, falls out of focus, and dissolves. The number of cells stays near a balance, held by what the medium can feed. Each cell lives for a while. The organism goes on. The two rates of the chemistry drift slowly, along a path set by the seed, through the regions where this chemistry can live: spots that divide like cells, worms, coral, and labyrinths. As they drift, the organism turns from one body into another. The path is endless, and always new. What lies under the lens now is growing for the first time. Each presentation of the work is set by a few choices: the seed from which its organism grows, the palette of its light, the pace of its life, how closely we look, how shallow the focus is, and the flaws of the lens. Within those choices, the life itself remains its own. We often look for life elsewhere, in the sky and on other worlds, and we imagine it as something like us. Morphogen proposes something smaller and stranger: a life that begins here, made of a few simple rules, finding its own shape under glass. It is a life, small and strange, growing as you watch. ## Nightglow (2026) Page: https://gilles.dubuc.fr/nightglow/ — Press kit: https://gilles.dubuc.fr/press/#nightglow Medium: Real-time generative artwork: software, a simulation of a planet’s weather. Duration: infinite, generated live and always new. ### The essay The night side of a distant world, generated live by code. Gilles Dubuc, 2026. A real-time generative artwork. What you are looking at is the night side of a planet, generated live, by code. The planets of other stars are so far away that, even to our largest instruments, each one is a single point of light. Here, one of them comes close. Everything you see is generated live, by code. A simulation of the planet’s atmosphere runs inside the work, and each frame is computed from it as you watch. ### The planet Imagine a young giant planet, many times the mass of Jupiter, still warm from its birth. Its only light is its own: it glows faintly with the heat of its birth. Above its hot interior floats a thin layer of gas, where its weather happens. The work simulates that layer at half a million points, across a wide band of latitudes, with the physics that astronomers use for the weather of brown dwarfs and giant planets. The planet turns, and its turning bends every wind into currents and eddies. ### The storms Heat rises from deep inside, the way it rises in a pot of water before it boils, and it breaks through as storms. A storm beats in bursts, the way thunderstorms on Earth and on Jupiter build, collapse and build again. Every burst lifts the layer above it and lets it fall back. ### The waves When the layer falls back, it swings, like the surface of a pond after a stone, and a ring of waves spreads from every burst. These are gravity waves, waves of buoyancy in the air, and our own atmosphere is full of them. Here they meet, cross, and bend in the winds of the planet. ### The glow High above the clouds, the thin air glows very faintly, even at night. Satellites see this nightglow on Earth, and over thunderstorms they see it ripple, in rings. Where a wave squeezes the air, the glow grows brighter. On Earth the glow lies in layers, one above another, and here there are three. A wave reaches each of them in turn, so the light climbs as it spreads. ### Lightning In the heart of a burst, lightning flashes now and then. For an instant it lights the cloud from within. Then the cloud is dark again, and a new ring leaves the storm. Watch the centre of a fresh ring: that is where the storm has just beaten. ### The grains of light The picture is made of grains of light, about half a million of them, the way a camera made for the dark catches light a few particles at a time. The grains are carried by the wind, and they are born where the light is, so they gather on the rings. Each one leaves its exact share of light in four pixels. Together, they are the image. ### The satellite We watch from a satellite in orbit, looking down at a slant toward the horizon. The planet curves away beneath us. The lens keeps the middle sharp, and softens the edges and the corners, as real lenses do. As the satellite drifts, the layers of light slide past one another, and the depth appears. ### The weather The turning of the planet shapes everything. It gathers the winds into bands that blow east and west, and it spins the storms into vortices. How fast the planet turns, and how quickly its winds fade, decide what kind of weather it has: fine and restless, or wide and swirling. These are the rules that astronomers use to understand the weather of giant planets and brown dwarfs. ### Variations A few choices set each presentation of the work: the seed of its planet, the palette of its light, the pace of its time, how high the satellite flies, how often storms rise and how large they grow, how fast the planet turns, how calm its weather is, and the flaws of the lens. Inside those limits, the weather is the planet’s own. ### Weather, far away The weather of other worlds lies far beyond our sight, so we imagine it with the physics we know. Nightglow shows one such night: storms beating in the dark, and the sky answering with rings of light. It is weather, far away, glowing in the dark. ### The film Nightglow, the film. 2026. 7 minutes, colour, sound. Narrated in English, with subtitles. A companion to the work, narrated over the work itself. The film follows the weather from the storms to the glow, and shows each step in diagrams computed from the simulation as it runs. ###Gilles Dubuc, 2026Real-time generative artworkInfinite duration #### How it is made A one-and-a-half-layer shallow-water model of a young giant planet’s weather layer, 1024 by 512 points, runs on four CPU cores, forced by convective storms. Half a million grains carried by its wind on the GPU glow where gravity waves squeeze three airglow layers, at 60 frames per second. #### Contact Texts, images, videos and the film are in the press kit. For enquiries: gilles@dubuc.fr or +33 6 30 92 49 03. ### The film (6 min 31 s, narrated in English, with subtitles) Watch: https://gilles.dubuc.fr/nightglow/#film — Download: https://media.dubuc.fr/nightglow/press/film/gilles-dubuc-nightglow-film-16x9.mp4 Narration: What you are looking at is the night side of a planet, generated live, by code. The planets of other stars are so far away that, even to our largest instruments, each one is a single point of light. Here, one of them comes close. A simulation of the planet's atmosphere runs inside the work itself, and from it, each frame is computed as you watch, sixty times a second. Imagine a young giant planet, many times the mass of Jupiter, still warm from its birth. Its only light is its own: it glows faintly with the heat of its birth. Above its hot interior floats a thin layer of gas, where its weather happens. That layer is simulated here, at half a million points, across a wide band of latitudes. The planet turns, and its turning bends every wind into currents and eddies. Heat rises from deep inside, the way it rises in a pot of water before it boils. It breaks through as storms. A storm beats, in bursts, the way thunderstorms on Earth and on Jupiter build, collapse, and build again. Every burst lifts the layer above it, and lets it fall back. When the layer falls back, it swings, like the surface of a pond after a stone. A ring of waves spreads from every burst and crosses the sky. These are gravity waves, waves of buoyancy in the air, and our own atmosphere is full of them. Here, they meet, cross, and bend in the winds of the planet. High above the clouds, the thin air glows, very faintly, even at night. Satellites see this glow on Earth, and over thunderstorms they see it ripple, in rings. Where a wave squeezes the air, the glow grows brighter. On Earth, the glow lies in layers, one above another, and here there are three. A wave reaches each of them in turn, so the light climbs as it spreads. In the heart of a burst, lightning flashes. For an instant, it lights the cloud from within. Then the cloud is dark again, and a new ring leaves the storm. Watch the centre of a fresh ring: that is where the storm has just beaten. The picture is made of grains of light, about half a million of them, the way a camera made for the dark catches light a few particles at a time. The grains are carried by the wind, and they are born where the light is, so they gather on the rings. Each one leaves its exact share of light in four pixels. Together, they are the image. We watch from a satellite in orbit, looking down at a slant toward the horizon. The planet curves away beneath us. The lens keeps the middle sharp, and softens the edges and the corners, as real lenses do. As the satellite drifts, the layers of light slide past one another, and the depth appears. The turning of the planet shapes everything. It gathers the winds into bands that blow east and west, and it spins the storms into vortices. How fast the planet turns, and how quickly its winds fade, decide what kind of weather it has: fine and restless, or wide and swirling. These are the rules that astronomers use to understand the weather of giant planets and brown dwarfs. Each presentation of the work is set by a few choices: the seed of its planet, the palette of its light, the pace of its time, how high the satellite flies, how often storms rise and how large they grow, how fast the planet turns, and the flaws of the lens. Within those choices, the weather remains its own. The weather of other worlds lies far beyond our sight, so we imagine it with the physics we know. Nightglow shows one such night: storms beating in the dark, and the sky answering with rings of light. It is weather, far away, glowing in the dark.