Presenting Our 2026 Arts in the Age of AI Laureates

Villa Albertine, the French Institute for Culture and Education in the United States, launched its new residency program, Arts in the Age of AI, at the AI Action Summit in Paris, with an announcement by French Minister of Culture Rachida Dati. This initiative, funded by French-American patron and technology leader Fidji Simo, will host eight artists and culture professionals who incorporate artificial intelligence into their work, in the United States.   

Villa Albertine will welcome four creators each year in the United States in 2026 and 2027, for two-month research and exploration residencies. The creators will receive individualized artistic and professional guidance, tapping into the full AI ecosystem, including tech companies, universities, research centers, and cultural institutions. They will carry out their residencies in the location most relevant to their research project among the 10 cities where Villa Albertine has offices, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Miami, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. 

The participants were selected by a jury of French and American AI professionals, including Refik Anadol (New Media Artist, Filmmaker, and Pioneer of Artificial Intelligence Aesthetics), Marcella Lista (Art Historian and Chief Curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, in charge of the New Media Collection), Chad Nelson (Creative Specialist at OpenAI), and Mathieu Lorrain (Head of Creative at Google DeepMind).  

Our 2026 Residents

Louis-Paul Caron

Louis-Paul Caron works at the intersection of climate and technology, using digital tools to create immersive and thought-provoking narratives. Among his recent projects, he evaluated the impact of climate disasters on human memory and perception. He uses 3D animation, oil painting, generative art, and AI to blur boundaries between reality and fiction. At the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, he is currently exhibiting Generating the Future, centered on AI’s role in reimagining climate narratives. He studied product design at École Boulle, digital art at Design Academy Eindhoven, and animation at ENSAD. He is a finalist for the Climart Prize and the Digital Art Prize. He has participated in residencies, including at the Feÿ Art Festival and Le Grand Large. Additionally, he has participated in international exhibitions in Art Basel, Seoul, Brussels, New York, Milan, Dubai, Berlin, and London.

Residency Project: Pacific Palisades is an AI-driven immersive installation that reimagines lost homes as a dynamic living memory, blending painting, sound data, and generative art to evoke nostalgia and deepen our connection to a changing environment. The project will explore solastalgia, a term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the distress experienced when one’s home environment undergoes irreversible change. Unlike nostalgia, which longs for a distant past, solastalgia is a grief anchored in the present, triggered by environmental destruction and climate change.

Lou Fauroux  

Lou Fauroux in an artist and graduate of ECAL and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (2022), where she focused on the ethical issues surrounding AI and technology’s influence on humans. She uses video, sculpture, installation, and 3D and explores the ethical implications of AI and technology’s impact on humanity, while re-appropriating pop culture and personal queer experiences to create new mythologies and challenge social power structures. Influenced by 1990s digital culture, Lou Fauroux critically engages with Web 2.0’s emancipatory promises, advocating for a radical, queer hacker-led challenge to big tech monopolies.

Residency Project: Create a sequel to Porn Family (2019), titled Family X, exploring the evolving adult film industry and its impact on performers. Seven years later, amid AI-generated content, new platforms like OnlyFans, and shifting political landscapes, the film follows queer performer Kasey Warner and their
community. Through intimate moments and activism, it highlights the intersection of technology,
representation, and labor rights. The genre it focuses on a has proven to be standard defining for the wider film industry.

Hanako Murakami

Hanako Murakami is an artist born in Japan and raised in Belgium. She has been based in Paris since 2012. Murakami graduated with a BA in Aesthetics from the University of Tokyo. She has an MA in New Media from Tokyo University of the Arts. She was a resident at Le Fresnoy (2014) and the Getty Research Institute and George Eastman Museum (2018). She was awarded the VOCA Prize (Japan) and is a laureate of the CNAP National Commission Image 3.0. Her pieces are part of the CNAP, FRAC, and Getty Museum collections.

Residency Project: Challenge our conventional understanding of vision and photography through AI and eyetracking, transforming the act of seeing into an active, creative force that generates images and
redefines visual perception. At the core of this project is the idea that seeing is not a neutral act—it is an
engagement, an intervention, a transformation.

Olivain Porry

Olivain Porry was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique.  He is an artist and researcher focused on technology and communication. He received a PhD in practice-based visual arts from SACRe / EnsadLab (2022). Porry creates cybernetic and generative AI participatory systems and challenges traditional views on authorship and spectatorship. He publishes peer-reviewed research on robotics and technologically driven art practices. He has exhibited in France and Sweden, including at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, La Gaîté Lyrique, and La Maison des Métallos. He was nominated for the Pulsar Prize for innovation in art and technology. His current research examines large language models and their socio-technical impact, reframing relationships between humans, AI, and nature.

Residency Project: Challenge our conventional understanding of vision and photography through AI and eyetracking, transforming the act of seeing into an active, creative force that generates images and
redefines visual perception. At the core of this project is the idea that seeing is not a neutral act—it is an
engagement, an intervention, a transformation.

About Our Partner:

Fidji Simo

Fidji Simo is the Chief Executive Officer and Chair of Instacart. She is a consumer technology industry veteran who has spent more than 15 years leading the operations, strategy and product development for some of the world’s leading businesses. Prior to joining Instacart, Simo spent 10 years at Facebook, where she was the Head of Facebook. She also serves as a member of the Board of Directors at OpenAI and Shopify. Simo founded the Metrodora Institute, a multidisciplinary medical clinic and research foundation dedicated to the care and cure of complex chronic conditions, and serves as President of the Metrodora Foundation. Simo holds a Master of Management from HEC Paris and spent the last year of her Masters program at UCLA Anderson School of Business. She grew up in Sète, France, and now lives in California with her husband and daughter.  

Contact:

Camille Jeanjean, New Media Officer – camille.jeanjean@villa-albertine.org