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 photographs the artist did not take. Inside the video game Final Fantasy XV (2016), the player’s journey is automatically photographed by Prompto, a non-playable companion whose images are produced by the game’s own system of framing, timing, filters and selection. Over more than 200 hours of gameplay, Maxim Zmeyev assembled an archive of 3,225 images generated by this in-game, non-human gaze.

From this archive, the project redirects authorship through a chain of AI models: the material is reduced to a fixed sequence of 36 images, translated into texts, and then transformed into synthetic studio photographs of virtual objects. The final works are not screenshots, and not photographs made with a camera. They are images of things that never physically existed: vehicles, creatures, garments, weapons, traps, viewing devices and display structures. Prompt0 5.36. asks what photography becomes when seeing, selecting and shaping images are no longer held inside a single human gaze, but distributed across technical systems.

Prompt0 5.36. is a photographic project about delegated vision, automated selection and authorship distributed across technical systems. It starts from an archive produced inside the video game Final Fantasy XV (2016), but not by the player. During the journey, Prompto, a non-playable companion, automatically photographs the route, the encounters, the pauses and the heroic scenes. His images are generated by the game’s own apparatus of framing, timing, filters and selection. Over more than 200 hours of gameplay, Maxim Zmeyev collected 3,225 images made by this in-game, non-human gaze.

The point of departure is not the photograph as an intentional capture, but an archive already authored in advance. Zmeyev then redirects this material through a chain of AI models. The archive is reduced to a fixed sequence of 36 images, echoing the structure of a 35mm film roll: a finite form imposed on excessive visual production. From the same material, AI models generate texts, descriptions, object prompts and institutional language. In parallel, selected photographs are paired with objects and forms found elsewhere in Prompto’s larger image world: vehicles, weapons, garments, trophies, tools, viewing devices, traps and fragments of bodies.

These pairings are translated into virtual objects and staged as studio photographs. The resulting works are not screenshots, not documentation of physical sculptures, and not photographs made with a camera. They are synthetic studio images of rendered objects that do not exist outside the image. A car becomes a moving support for photographic fragments. A beast becomes both body and frame. A lure, a sword, a pair of trousers, a pinball machine or a viewing device becomes a surface on which the journey returns as souvenir, trap, prosthesis, fetish, residue or instrument.

Here, the photograph is no longer simply printed, framed or displayed. It is folded into another form, attached to an object, carried by a surface, absorbed into a device. Each object becomes a way of exhibiting images, and each image becomes dependent on the thing that holds it. The works operate between photography, rendering, object, frame and miniature exhibition structure. They still look photographic, but the usual guarantees of photography have already disappeared: there was no physical object, no camera in front of it, no single authorial eye, and no stable category able to contain the result.

Prompt0 5.36. is not interested in AI as spectacle, tool or threat. It is concerned with a quieter condition: images are increasingly produced, selected, ranked, stabilised and made legible before they reach “our” vision. In games, feeds, interfaces, archives and generative systems, the field of possible images is prepared in advance. The subject is invited to choose, but only after the conditions of choice have already been organised elsewhere.

The prompts, responses, generated texts, failed attempts and revisions are preserved as part of the work. They are not hidden behind the final image, because the project is not only about what is produced, but about how decisions move from one system to another. The artist does not disappear. He constructs the field, assembles the archive, sets constraints, redirects processes, edits results and exposes the machinery through which the image becomes possible.

The central shift in Prompt0 5.36. is not that machines can now produce images for us. It is that preformatted visibility increasingly passes for our own seeing. The project slows this condition down until it becomes visible as form: from automated in-game photograph to AI-selected sequence, from sequence to text, from archive to virtual object, and from virtual object back into the appearance of photography.

Prompt0 5.36. The Road Was the Ruin and the Ruin Was the Road, 36-image sequence from the in-game archive