Notes on practice from a filmmaker working with AI, gaming engines, and post-internet aesthetics.
This is not a tutorial. Not a framework. Not a manifesto in the traditional sense. It's a working document that reflects how I think about making films and art with machines -- and why "with" is already the wrong word.
Alteration over augmentation. I don't use AI to do things faster or better. I use it to displace my own thinking -- to see connections I wouldn't see alone, to produce what wouldn't exist without the friction between human intent and machine behavior. The goal is not optimization. The goal is displacement.
Post-documentary. My films start from real events, real people, real archives. But the treatment is hybrid: gaming engines, deepfakes, generative images, found footage from virtual worlds. The boundary between document and fabrication is the subject itself.
Liquid writing. Not a method in the academic sense. A way of working where research, writing, image-making, and tool-building happen simultaneously, contaminating each other. The film emerges from the process, not from a screenplay.
AI as subject, not just tool. The technology is never neutral in my work. When I use a generative model, the artifacts, the hallucinations, the biases are part of the film. The machine's failures are as valuable as its successes.
Films, books, artists, and thinkers that shaped this practice. Not a ranked list -- a map of connections.
| Harun Farocki | Parallel I-IV, Eye/Machine. Operational images, gaming as representation. |
| Chris Marker | Sans Soleil, Level Five. Essay film as research method. Memory as montage. |
| Peter Tscherkassky | Outer Space. Cinema's experimental grammar at its origin. |
| Hito Steyerl | How Not to Be Seen, Duty Free Art. Post-internet image politics. |
| Forensic Architecture | Investigation as aesthetic practice. Spatial and temporal reconstruction. |
| Philippe Grandrieux | Sombre, Un lac. The body as image beyond representation. |
| Romain Champalaune | Vie & Mort d'Oscar Perez. |
| Mr. Robot | Fluid identity, paranoia, digital unreliable narrator. |
| A Scanner Darkly | Rotoscope as document-fiction boundary. |
| Gregory Chatonsky | Pioneer of net art and AI art. AI as transformation, not tool -- as profound as the invention of photography. |
| Trevor Paglen | Machine vision, invisible images, AI and surveillance. |
| Peter Burr | Visual patterns through video game engines. |
| Xu Bing | Surveillance footage as artistic material. |
| Mark Lombardi | Narrative structures. Data visualization as investigation. |
| Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst | Holly+, Spawning. AI as collaborative creative entity. |
| Ian Cheng | Emissaries. Autonomous simulations as narrative. |
| Gerhard Richter | Painting at the limit of photography. |
| Francis Bacon | The figure against representation. |
| Roger Caillois | Les jeux et les hommes. Classification of play: mimicry, alea, agon, ilinx. |
| Jacques Henriot | Le jeu. Philosophy of play as attitude, not object. |
| Vilem Flusser | Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Technical images and apparatus. |
| Gilbert Simondon | On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Machines are not tools. |
| Donna Haraway | Staying with the Trouble. Sympoiesis, making-with. |
| Yuk Hui | Art and Cosmotechnics. Technology as culturally situated. |
| Byung-Chul Han | In the Swarm. Digital culture and the crisis of narrative. |
| Yume Nikki | Dream exploration as narrative structure. |
| Grand Theft Auto V | Open world as found footage. Source material for Swatted. |
| Journalism as primary source | "The driving force behind my work is always an encounter, whether with people or by reading an article." |
| Film criticism | The practice began through writing about cinema, not making it. |
This list is incomplete. It grows with the work.
How I use AI tools for documentary research and artistic production.
Research & thinking
- Claude Code as primary collaborator — config, workflows, and rationale in claude-code-workflow
- 38 agent personas (filmmakers, philosophers, artists) for structured creative consultation
Generative production
- ComfyUI for image/video generation pipelines — architecture in comfyui-cinema-pipeline
- Blender VSE + Pallaidium for AI generation inside the editing timeline (stills → video, ControlNet-guided sequences)
- LTX-2, Wan 2.2, Flux.2, HunyuanVideo — current model stack for video generation
Editing & post-production
- Final Cut Pro 12 as primary NLE (assemblage, offline editing, semantic transcript search) — workflows in fcp-workflow
- DaVinci Resolve for color grading and online conform
- VoiceInk for offline voice dictation
Capture
- Magic Lantern / open hardware for RAW cinema capture — workflows in open-source-cinema
Infrastructure
- RTX 5090 (GPU inference, ComfyUI), Mac Mini M4 (always-on server, Paris), MacBook Air M3 (primary workstation)
- Tailscale mesh VPN connecting all machines
Research is not a phase that precedes production. Research is production.
- Accumulate -- Gather everything. Web archives, court documents, social media traces, news articles, academic papers. Don't filter yet.
- Compress -- Use AI to summarize, cross-reference, find patterns. Sparse priming representations to keep large corpora accessible.
- Displace -- Feed the research back through generative tools. Not to illustrate findings, but to produce new images and connections from them.
- Confront -- Show the machine's output to the human subjects, to witnesses, to experts. The gap between what the AI produces and what people remember is where the film lives.
Films
- The Goldberg Variations -- hybrid feature on Joshua Ryne Goldberg and the multiplication of online identities. Villa Albertine 2026.
- Virus -- hybrid feature on Mihai Ionut Paunescu and cybercrime infrastructure.
Next territory
- Video games with AI — applying the same methodology (post-documentary, liquid writing, alteration over augmentation) to interactive narrative and game worlds.