Portfolio: Transatlantic Dreams

Each image in Louis-Paul Caron’s portfolio reimagines a facet of the Franco-American relationship through the distortions of machine vision. In Symbols, Caron plays with birds as emblems of freedom, pairing the Gallic rooster, proud yet fragile, rooted in land and culture, with the American eagle, a powerful predator and king of the skies.

In The History of Cinema (Past, Present, Future), workers leave a factory in a scene that evokes one of the first films ever made—the Lumière brothers’ 1895 film shot at their Lyon workshop. The workers walk toward the Hollywood Hills and a misspelled Hollywood sign, an unsettling reminder of how AI threatens to transform the film industry. That same unease runs through A Technological Race (On AI and Data Centers), where a digital glitch fuses the French and American flags into an uncanny, machine-made alliance. 

Flags reappear in Architecture, in which Caron presents a technologically advanced future city that is being overtaken by encroaching desert. A lone figure in The Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, embodies the generation that fought for freedom, peace, and democracy during World War II. Here, however, grave markers are submerged under rising waters, a haunting vision of climate change eroding the world they helped to save. 

In Rosa Bonheur, Caron revisits the nineteenth-century French painter famed for her detailed paintings of animals. Bonheur found an audience in the U.S. more receptive than the one she often encountered in France. Caron here imagines Bonheur at work on a canvas featuring a Normande cow and a bison—symbols of rural France and the American Great Plains—set against a landscape where power lines, pollution, and development have begun to erode a fragile ecosystem. 

Exploring Space Together evokes the Franco- American partnership in science, with a French and an American astronaut floating side by side in orbit until a new reality intrudes: the Earth burning below.

Louis-Paul Caron is a French digital artist based in Lyon, whose work has been exhibited internationally. Through video art, oil painting, and AI, he explores our evolving relationship with nature and climate change. Find more of his work online here.

This portfolio first appeared in States, the annual magazine of Villa Albertine, published in January 2026.