Violaine Boutet de Monvel holds a Master’s degree in Art History from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a PhD in Film and Media Studies from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her dissertation – From Video Feedback to Generative AI (defended in January 2025) – bridges early video art and contemporary algorithmic aesthetics through the lenses of surveillance and synthesis. It is the first doctoral thesis in France to address AI’s impact on creative practice since the advent of text-to-image models in 2021, weaving media theory and archaeology with the histories of art, cinema, television, and the web to examine the evolution of cybernetic feedback in the deep learning era.
This research has led to numerous presentations and publications, including in NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies (Winter 2024) and a collective volume following the Imago seminar at ENS-PSL (Summer 2023), wherein she has developed a definition of art as noise magnification, reframing the engineering bias of information theory and further tracing the emergence of recursive aesthetics in continuity with systemic, relational, and serial forms since Impressionism.
Currently, her work extends to the industrial, sociopolitical, and environmental implications of AI applied to visual culture and analysis. She co-organized the international conference Cut/Generate: Montage and AI (Sorbonne Nouvelle, April 2025), which brought together scholars and artists to explore how generative AI is reshaping montage practices from both theoretical and practical perspectives. With a focus on technological infrastructures, GAFAM strategies, and evolving patterns of image production and consumption, she is also investigating the cosmological dimensions AI may open in connection with current space exploration efforts and transhumanist/posthumanist thought.
Finally, she has designed courses at Sorbonne Nouvelle on the history and aesthetics of television, video art, and generative AI, building a genealogy of creative practices that includes audiovisual synthesis, structural film, exhibited cinema, net art, and glitch. She previously taught modern and contemporary art at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has participated in real-time video processing workshops, notably with the Phase Space collective in Brooklyn, and has been awarded research grants and residencies at Brown University, Emory University, and NYU.