Leading institution: HEAD – Genève

Project Leader: Douglas Edric Stanley

Team: Faust Perillaud, Guillaume Stagnaro

Financing: HES -SO

Co-financing: HEAD – Genève

The Playable Cinema project is part of an interdisciplinary field of research that combines cinema, video games, and artificial intelligence. In a context where the boundaries between these media are becoming increasingly blurred—both aesthetically and technologically—this project examines how video games, the interactive medium par excellence, interact with the legacy of narrative cinema.

Through a critical approach to remediation and media convergence, this project examines the forms of hybridization between games and films, their respective crises of representation, narration, and device, as well as the new creative potential offered by artificial intelligence. Using the latest image analysis tools, Playable Cinema seeks to renew the way we interact with moving images by offering a playful and experimental approach.

Playable Cinema explores the links between cinema and video games by developing an interactive device where moving images can be analyzed, recomposed, and played using artificial intelligence technologies. Using an image analysis model trained on sequences from films (particularly westerns) and video games (such as Red Dead Redemption), the project allows users to manipulate film images within a playful installation.

This system is based on advanced image segmentation, an annotated database, and an interface that allows users to generate audiovisual montages in real time. The aim is to explore how video game interaction can become a form of film editing, and how AI can be used for creative purposes, far removed from its dominant commercial or security applications.

The project will result in an interactive installation, the open-source publication of the tools developed, and promotion through articles, videos, public presentations, and specialized festivals. By combining technological experimentation and aesthetic questioning, Playable Cinema offers an original reinterpretation of contemporary narrative forms in the era of hybrid media.