Benjamin Bardou (French, b. 1981) is a Paris-based artist who explores the relationship between memory, cities and digital technologies.With a background in visual arts and visual effects, he combines locally trained AI models with point clouds, volumetric video and Gaussian splatting to build immersive works that unfold like waking dreams.,
Bardou has collaborated with artists including Ridley Scott, Liam Wong and Ikumi Nakamura, and has also worked with companies such as Apple.He has developed MEGALOPOLIS, a long-term project using artificial imagination to explore the city as a site of layered memory, threshold states and suspended consciousness.Within that project, Citizens of Megalopolis was released on Objkt.com in November 2022.
In Memories of an Exhibition (2024), Bardou produced 500 unique volumetric-video works reconstructing the residual memory of paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, minted on braindrops.cloud and shown as a solo exhibition at Galerie A+E in Paris.
Using AI models trained on his own archive of work together with Gaussian splatting, Bardou reconstructed the Overlook Hotel from The Shining as a navigable, fragmented memory space, screened as Shadows of the Shining from his Latent Movies series at Global Fusion Barcelona.,Fragments of the Latent Space (2022-2025), shown at Global Fusion Paris, treats the latent space as a night sky of unrealized images.Bardou conceived The Flow as a film-essay with a theoretical duration of 24 hours, using AI-generated imagery to trace the stream of consciousness through three states, Hell, Spleen and Ideal, drawn from Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin.
