Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis
Filmmaker, artist
March-May 2026
- Cinema
- Miami
“The greatest challenge is not to film the truth, but to create a space where the multiple truths of an individual can coexist and enter into dialogue with one another.”
I am an artist and filmmaker. Born in France, I spent over ten years in Belgium, where editing became my first territory of experimentation. At INSAS, with filmmaker Olivier Smolders, I discovered liquid writing—a form where everything is generated simultaneously: writing, shooting, and editing, in a continuous flow of creation. At Le Fresnoy, I explored filmmaking without a camera, intervening in the interstices of digital image generation, creating shots through AI, 3D, and game engines. Documentary gesture guides my practice, but it is altered, expanded, and reconfigured. My approach moves beyond the question of truth or falsehood to probe the very mechanisms of narrative production in the post-truth era. The latent space becomes my new documentary territory, where singular traces of the real contaminate generative models.
My works explore the invisible territories of the digital. I work with individuals shaped by technology, whose memories fragment between avatars and multiple identities. I engage in long-term research to capture the moment when their story shifts into something else—neither testimony nor fiction, but a counterfactual narrative that questions what could have been. In Swatted (2018), events take shape through video game footage that I hack in real time. By stripping away textures to achieve a wireframe aesthetic, I stage the stories of gamers recounting their struggles to escape “swatting,” a form of cyber-harassment that puts their lives at risk in every match. In Maalbeek (2020), I worked with the aesthetics of point clouds—pixelated constellations—to convey the fragmented memory of Sabine, a survivor yet amnesiac of the March 22, 2016 Brussels metro bombing. In Rewild (2025), we follow a farmer attempting to re-stage the tragic disappearance of his herd within a farming simulation game—even as the game itself limits the representation of death. In parallel, I am developing a permacomputing approach that combines open-source AI models running locally, creative upcycling of existing technologies, and sustainable production tools, as a way to reclaim my technical means and define my artistic singularity.
Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis is a French filmmaker and artist whose hybrid documentary practice—spanning video, installation, and performance—explores the invisible and the unspeakable of the digital realm.
A graduate of INSAS, LUCA School of Arts, and Le Fresnoy, his work has been presented at the Centre Pompidou, the Venice Biennale, and Cannes Critics’ Week. Swatted (Slamdance, Oscar Qualified) and Maalbeek (César 2022) examine technological transformations in the post-Internet era.
An associate artist at Centquatre-Paris, he is currently developing two feature films, Virus and The Goldberg Variations, and will present Rewild at the Biennale NÉMO in October 2025.
“Goldberg Variations” is a hybrid feature film born out of my investigation into Joshua Ryne Goldberg, now in his thirties, who embodied more than a hundred online personas until his arrest by the FBI in 2015.
The story begins in 2023. I was conducting research on Gamergate and deepfakes when I stumbled upon Joshua Goldberg—presented everywhere as a terrorist. But something in the media narrative didn’t add up. As I pulled at the threads, I uncovered its dizzying scale: 40,000 posts written under a hundred different personas—all fake. He had explored every corner of the Internet, practicing the art of trolling on an industrial scale—an entire factory of fictitious characters designed to pour fuel on the fire across every imaginable community.
I first engaged with these traces through artistic installations presented in exhibitions (Biennale Némo, Videoformes, Port des Créateurs), attempting to map this digital vertigo.
Fascinated by this complexity, I then decided to write to him directly in prison. Against all odds, he replied from his federal cell—the beginning of an extensive correspondence. What followed was a year of intense exchanges: 500 pages of letters, video calls. In August 2024, after his release, I traveled to Florida to meet him. Ten days face-to-face revealed a dimension completely obscured by the digital.
The film is now taking shape through a collaborative dynamic. Joshua—an obsessive cinephile capable of reciting entire dialogues from obscure films—actively participates in the research and experimentation. My approach is to slip into his perception in order to bring forth the matrix of his inner world. The film will be yet another iteration of Joshua without being him—allowing the viewer to experience deepfake, falsity, and identity in constant retreat.
The residency will allow me to capture Orange Park and Middleburg—their atmospheres, their liminal spaces. These materials will serve as datasets to train my own AI models, which will generate the textures and settings of the film.
Joshua is not an isolated case but a metonym for our time. In October 2024, Elon Musk shared a fake article signed “Emily Goldstein”—a persona created by Joshua ten years earlier. These digital ghosts haunt the public sphere. By filming Joshua up close, I reveal an individual on the autism spectrum, diagnosed late, who found in the multiplication of identities a way to exist.
Jacksonville, Orange Park, and Middleburg (where Joshua now lives), then Miami for AI research.
Joshua now lives in Middleburg, surrounded by his animals, with the AC and fans running constantly against the Florida heat, and ultra-niche art films playing endlessly in the background. Orange Park remains etched in his history—it is where he grew up and where he was arrested in 2015.
I will capture these spaces—the freight trains that punctuate the nights, the deserted strip malls, the empty parking lots at 3 a.m., and his bedroom from which he imagined his conspiracies.
Miami will serve as my base for potential collaborations with tech companies specializing in AI and with researchers at the University of Miami, notably Joseph Uscinski, a specialist in disinformation. I will also collaborate with Mike Wendling from the BBC, who covered Joshua’s case. This three-month residency (February–April 2026) will allow me to train my models on the collected materials in order to reconstruct and reimagine this complex story.
In partnership with
Films Grand Huit
Le Port des Créateurs
https://leportdescreateurs.net/
BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news