Prompt0 5.36.

2026
Virtual Photography
Synthetic studio photographs of virtual objects, in-game photographic archive, AI-generated texts and prompts
Dimensions variable / installation version

Prompt0 5.36. begins with a photographic archive that the artist did not take.

In the video game Final Fantasy XV (2016), the player’s journey is automatically photographed by Prompto, a non-player character who acts as a virtual photographer. His images do not belong to a direct human gaze: they are produced by the game’s own apparatus, which chooses the framing, the moment, the filter, and what deserves to be kept. Over more than 200 hours of gameplay, Maxim Zmeyev assembled an archive of 3,225 images produced by this in-game vision.

From this archive, Zmeyev sets up a protocol assisted by AI models: an initial model reduces the 3,225 images to around 300 through an aesthetic rating; a second model examines them one by one to assemble a sequence of 36 images as a possible linear photographic narrative. This sequence is then turned into descriptions, prompts, virtual objects, and synthetic images. The final works are neither screenshots nor photographs of physical objects: they are synthetic studio images of rendered objects that exist only through the image.

Prompt0 5.36. stages a distributed vision and a delegated authorship: the acts of seeing, selecting, classifying, and producing images no longer belong to a single human subject, but are redistributed between a video game, an automated character, generative models, an archive, and an artist who organizes their frictions.

Type 1.5.11.

Manual 4.26.

The first shift has a name: Prompto. Before AI enters the project, it begins with this virtual photographer, a non-player character in Final Fantasy XV whom the game entrusts with the visual memory of the journey. The starting archive is therefore already produced by another gaze: delegated, automated, and embedded in the game’s apparatus. Photography exists here before the artist’s intention. It is triggered, framed, and preserved elsewhere.

The project therefore does not make artificial intelligence its main subject. AI appears as another layer within a chain of already automated gazes. The stakes are broader: images increasingly reach us after other systems have already seen, sorted, classified, and made them legible. Human vision no longer arrives first. It inherits a prepared field.

Zmeyev then establishes a protocol of constraints and delegations. An initial AI model reduces the 3,225 images to around 300 through an aesthetic rating; a second model examines them one by one to assemble a fixed sequence of 36 images, conceived as a possible linear photographic narrative. The reference to the 36 exposures of a 35 mm roll of film is not merely formal: an analog constraint is imposed on digital overproduction. This sequence is then translated, through generative models, into texts, descriptions, prompts, and objects. The photographic material leaves the screen of the game and returns differently: not as the memory of a journey, but as raw material for a system of vision.

At this stage, the task is no longer only to select the images, but to give them a body. Zmeyev reintroduces objects and forms that he photographs inside the game world — vehicles, weapons, clothing, trophies, tools, optical devices, a serving of fries, fragments of bodies — not as simple motifs, but as exhibition supports, frames, surfaces, and carriers. The photographs are attached to them, carried by them, exhibited through them; each encounter opens a third level of reading, somewhere between memory, irony, nostalgia, fetish, and device.

These assemblages produce virtual objects, staged in turn as studio photographs. The final works do not document anything that existed before them. They are synthetic studio images: rendered objects with no material existence outside the image.

A car carries photographic fragments. A beast becomes both body and frame. A lure, a sword, a pair of trousers, a pinball machine, a viewing device, a serving of fries: each becomes a surface where the journey returns as memory, prosthesis, fetish, residue, or instrument.

Here, photography is no longer only printed, framed, or exhibited. It changes state: folded into another form, attached to an object, absorbed by a device. Each object becomes a possible support; each image depends on the body that holds it. The project does not choose between image, object, and exhibition device: it forces them to hold together.

The work preserves the appearance of photography while removing what has long grounded its authority: an object before the camera, an act of capture, an identifiable author, a stable relation to the real. What remains is no longer proof of a photographed world, but the trace of a series of decisions distributed between the video game, the automated character, the archive, the generative models, and an artist who brings these systems into tension.

The artist does not disappear into this chain; his gesture changes position. It is no longer only a matter of taking an image, but of constructing the conditions under which an image can appear. Authorship becomes distributed without being dissolved. Zmeyev sets the thresholds, the constraints, and the points of passage. He selects, slows down, preserves errors, and makes visible the prompts, responses, generated texts, and revisions. The machinery is not the hidden reverse side of the work. It is its material.

The core of Prompt0 5.36. is therefore not that machines can now produce images instead of us. It lies in the way preformatted visibility can pass as our own gaze. The project gives form to this quiet dispossession: from automated in-game photography to sequence, from sequence to text, from text to virtual object, from virtual object to the return of photographic appearance.

In the end, the viewer is not looking at images of a world. They are looking at the material remains of a gaze produced on their behalf.