AI as artistic method — position, research, and memory architecture from a filmmaker working across cinema, contemporary art, and AI.
Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis — filmmaker and artist based in Paris. César 2022, Cannes (Semaine de la Critique), IDFA, Hot Docs, Ars Electronica. Currently developing The Goldberg Variations (Villa Albertine 2026) and Virus.
Notes on practice, not a manifesto. How and why I work with machines — and why "with" is already the wrong word.
This repo brings together three things:
- Position — essays on the artistic practice: liquid writing, post-documentary, sovereignty, AI as subject
- Memory — the architecture problem: how to sustain a two-year documentary project with a stateless AI
- Research — methods and projects: spatial reconstruction, LoRA training, generative pipelines, tested on real films
Alteration over augmentation. I don't use AI to do things faster. I use it to displace my own thinking — to find connections I would miss alone. The goal is not optimization. The goal is displacement.
| Essay | Topic |
|---|---|
| Liquid Writing | Research, writing, image-making, and tool-building happen simultaneously, contaminating each other |
| Post-documentary | Films that start from real events but treat the boundary between document and fabrication as the subject itself |
| Post-photography | The image after the camera |
| Sovereignty | Data sovereignty as artistic position, not technical preference |
| On Sycophancy | Why AI agreement is more dangerous than AI error |
| Tripartite | Three image regimes: documentary, generative, hybrid |
| Verbatim | The value of raw transcript over summary |
| Domain | Key references |
|---|---|
| Cinema | Harun Farocki, Chris Marker, Hito Steyerl, Peter Tscherkassky, Philippe Grandrieux, Forensic Architecture |
| Art | Gregory Chatonsky, Trevor Paglen, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Ian Cheng |
| Theory | Roger Caillois, Vilém Flusser, Gilbert Simondon, Donna Haraway, Yuk Hui |
The hard problem in working with AI on long-form projects: the model has no memory.
| Document | What it addresses |
|---|---|
| The Filesystem is the Memory | Context engineering for a two-year documentary project. How the filesystem becomes the memory architecture for a stateless AI. |
Key insight: your CLAUDE.md is not a config file — it's a persistent instruction layer. Your memory/ directory is not a folder — it's a surrogate for what the model cannot retain. Your session backups are not archives — they're the only source of truth.
AI methods documented from active film production. Organized by function, not by tool — tools change every six months, the underlying questions don't.
| Method | What it solves |
|---|---|
| Spatial Reconstruction | Reconstruct real locations as navigable 3D spaces |
| 3D-Guided Image Generation | Control image composition via 3D scene data |
| Blender → ComfyUI Real-Time | Drive diffusion from live 3D animation |
| Custom Model Fine-Tuning | Train location- or character-specific image models |
| Cinematic Still Image | Generate stills in the register of documentary photography |
| Latent Drift Animation | Animate through latent space for oniric sequences |
| Archive Animation | Give motion to archival photographs and footage |
| Voice Direction | AI voice repair for documentary subjects |
| Image Upscaling | Cinema-grade upscaling pipeline |
| LLM Corpus Avatar | Build an AI avatar from a subject's written corpus |
Films and installations where these methods were developed.
| Project | Context | Year |
|---|---|---|
| DamasIA | Live performance, ARTE / Gaîté Lyrique | 2023 |
| Nemo | Installation, Biennale Nemo | 2023 |
| Ciclic Residency | R&D residency, Ciclic Animation, Vendôme | 2024 |
| Virus | Feature documentary (in production) | 2024— |
| Palimpseste mémoriel | Visual research, family archive LoRA | Ongoing |
| Farming Farocki | Film / installation (in development) | In dev |
| Essay | Topic |
|---|---|
| L'IA et l'artiste : cadre critique | Critical framework for AI in artistic practice |
| Dissolution des frontières médiatiques | How AI dissolves the boundary between media |
Living document. Updated as the films progress and the methods evolve.
Consolidated from: method · the-filesystem-is-the-memory · ai-cinema-research