Lou Fauroux
Artist, filmmaker
January-February 2026
- AI
- Los Angeles
“The project could be described, very broadly, as “GTA meets Hollywood Babylon,” through a queer, critical, and technological lens.”
After studying at ECAL, I graduated from ENSAD in Paris in 2022. Through video, sculpture, installation, and 3D, I explore the ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence and more generally the influence of technology on humans, seeking to decipher social structures of power through pop culture and media such as music and video games references. I made my first moving images from videos produced by the adult film industry in Los Angeles back in 2018.
Infusing my queer experience into multiple layers of narrative and representation, I try to re-appropriate the images I grew up with by creating new mythologies questioning current systems. Raised on Tumblr, GTA and The Sims, my visual and cultural education of the web is deeply marked by the digital culture of the 2000s. I’m also acutely aware of the blind spots of this Web 1.0 culture, whose emancipatory potential my post-Internet elders may have too readily assumed. While in the 2000-10s social networks promised to liberate society from dominant power structures and dissolve gender inequalities into the ether, my current position responds to the present decade—driven by the conviction that fluidity is not inscribed in technological systems but must instead be conquered by force.
I’m particularly interested and concerned by the anthropological changes new technologies have generated and such a short time frame.
Speculative narrations in dystopian settings mixed with very factual almost documentary and archival elements is a language I’ve developed that helps me highlight and explore ethical dilemmas.
In 2022, after graduating from ENSAD, Lou Fauroux integrated Artagon residency (Pantin), and presented her first solo show WhatRemains, which was a finalist for SCAM Emergence award. In 2023, she created a multimedia sound platform named FÆRIES alongside French DJ Jennifer Cardini. Lou Fauroux has presented her video works and films at institutions such as MoMA, (The Porn Selector premiered in New Directors/ New Films (2024) Film at Lincoln Center (New York) ; Centre Pompidou (Paris), FRAC Poitou-Charentes ; Forde (Geneva) ; Fondation Pernod-Ricard, and in various film festivals (Cinéma du Réel, Kurzfilm Hamburg, London Film Festival..). She is laureate for FoRTE Île-de-France for The Internet Collapse (2024). In 2024, she presented her solo show K-Detox as part of Exo Exo booth in Art Basel Paris, and exhibited in Palais de Tokyo and in Salle 37 after a 3 months residency onsite. Her work is part of KADIST, FRAC île-de-France and Poitou-Charente collections.
Alongside her film and installation work, Lou is currently seeking to develop a video game conceived as a narrative and conceptual extension of her cinematic practice. The film would precede, and later give rise to, a game, following a methodology (3D animated render) she has previously explored.
The project (working title Diamonds and Rust) imagines a docu-fictional Los Angeles built from deliberately anachronistic layers of the city’s history. AI-driven avatars—trained via APIs and created from real individuals (living and deceased, famous and anonymous)—interact within reconstructed environments that blend multiple eras. These anachronisms are used to surface ethical questions around presence, memory, identity, and the anthropological shifts produced by technologies such as the internet, smartphones, and AI.
A significant archival dimension focuses on the Sewing Circle, a network of queer / dyke artists and filmmakers from Hollywood’s Golden Age who lived, loved and created under the constraints of the Hays Code (lavender marriages, hidden identities, erased works). Their former gathering place, the Garden of Alla on Sunset Boulevard—now a radically transformed site—becomes a key symbolic location within the project.
Drawing loosely from references such as Los Angeles Plays Itself, City of Quartz, L.A. Noire, Grand Theft Hamlet, Hollywood Babylon, and queer cinema and tech theory, the project could be described, very broadly, as “GTA meets Hollywood Babylon,” through a queer, critical, and technological lens. Iconic aspects of Los Angeles culture and its film and music industries (including adult film), gym culture, and car obsession appear through emblematic figures such as Alla Nazimova, Lana Del Rey, and Kasey Warner.
Los Angeles is at the very core of the research, the city as representation and history itself.
I will do research at ONE archives, a LGTBQ+ resource of USC, as well as June Mazer Lesbian collection in West Hollywood.
I plan on meeting key actors of tech-human relationships researchers and workers based in LA and its county, whether in its industry or education field.
I will attend the AVN Expo in Las Vegas, to get a sense of where AI is in the Adult Film Industry,
and will meet personalities of various industries (music, cinema, etc) in LA in order to conduct interviews and possibly integrate them as avatars into the piece.
In partnership with
Fidji Simo
CEO, Applications at OpenAI
Fidji Simo is CEO, Applications at OpenAI, where she leads the company’s applications such as ChatGPT, and all of its operations – including product development, engineering, sales, finance, marketing, legal, and people teams. A seasoned consumer technology leader, she has spent more than 15 years driving product, strategy, and operations for some of the world’s most influential companies.
Before joining OpenAI, Simo was Chief Executive Officer and Chair of Instacart, guiding it through its successful public offering. Prior to Instacart, she spent a decade at Meta, where she built Facebook’s advertising business and led the Facebook app.
Simo remains Chair of Instacart’s board and also serves on the Board of Directors at Shopify. She is the co-founder of Chronicle Bio, a tech‑bio company on a mission to cure complex chronic conditions.
Originally from the south of France, Simo holds a Master of Management from HEC Paris and completed her final year at UCLA Anderson School of Business. She now lives in California with her husband and daughter.
Palais de Tokyo
Europe’s largest contemporary art centre, the Palais de Tokyo is home to an exceptional, multisensorial and boundary-defying experience of artistic creation that is infused with the questions that shape our contemporary world. The Palais de Tokyo serves as an engaged and accessible space of reflection, where dreams and imagination develop into curiosity and awareness, where contemplation and escapism stimulate creativity and knowledge, and where artistic inclusivity fuels a process of individual and collective transformation.
Exo Exo
https://exoexo.xyz/
Orphée Films