Simon "Raion" Lavi is a French photographer and multimedia artist who works with artificial intelligence. Since 2021 his work has focused on the interplay between AI and photography. He uses post-photographic staging to explore the shifting relationship between fictitious characters and their environment. He was born in France and lived in the United States for twenty years.
Lavi has worked with digital technologies for about twenty years, specializing in 2D/3D and virtual reality. In early 2021 he became interested in VQGAN+CLIP, a neural network system that generates images from text. He has since explored other AI processes and integrated them into his practice. He describes AI as a door to a post-photographic space that keeps the essence of photography.
