Violaine Boutet de Monvel

From video feedback to generative AI: on recursivity in the arts and media ꩜

About

I am a postdoctoral researcher and scientific assistant in the Machine Visual Culture group at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History. I previously taught in the Film & Media Studies Department at Sorbonne Nouvelle, where I defended my PhD in 2025 on recursivity in the arts and media, from video feedback to generative AI. My dissertation – the first in France to address the impact of AI on visual culture since the rise of text-to-image models in 2021 – positioned it in relation to early video art through the lenses of surveillance and synthesis. My research weaves media theory and archaeology with the histories of art, cinema, television, and the web to trace the evolution of cybernetic feedback in the era of deep learning, situating recursive aesthetics in continuity with serial, systemic, and relational forms. It has led to numerous presentations and publications, including in NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies (Autumn 2023) and a collective volume following the Imago seminar at ENS-PSL (Summer 2023), where I developed a definition of art as noise magnification, reframing the engineering bias of information theory.