THE GALLERY OF SIMUL / ACTIONS
AI EPISODIC SERIES
2026
The Gallery is a radically experimental project unfolding as a dystopian episodic series set inside an art gallery that exists nowhere, suspended on the threshold between the real and the artificial. This threshold is not only metaphorical, but literal. At times, the gallery appears embedded in familiar landscapes; at others, it floats in deep space, disintegrating and exposing its true nature as a structure made of pixels, simulation, and hunger. In this sense, the gallery becomes both a stage and a creature: a liminal architecture that embodies the unstable condition of contemporary art itself, forever poised between presence and abstraction, materiality and image, ritual and spectacle.
Within The Gallery, generative video models are forced toward what suits them least and what they have likely been trained for the least: not action cinema, not realism, not narrative efficiency, but performance, symbolic gesture, suspension, minimalism, stillness, and ritual. In other words, they are bent away from mimesis and toward something more fragile, opaque, and disturbing: the language of presence without presence, action without explanation, cinema emptied of its conventional certainties.
Each episode revolves around the preparation of a new surreal event inside the gallery. The protagonists organize exhibitions, performances, apparitions, and impossible situations that always culminate in an uncanny rupture, an event that reveals the true nature of the place: monstrous, famished, and never neutral. The gallery is not a container for art, but a devouring organism at the edge of the world, a stomach made of architecture, flesh, and pixels, feeding on bodies, images, and symbolic residue.
The director of the gallery is myself, embodied through my digital avatar, accompanied by my two unborn performer-assistants, Marco and John, synthetic figures generated through AI. In each new episode, they are joined by the avatars of real collaborators — dancers, performers, and actors who choose to enter the project and lend themselves to its unstable ontology. Together, we inhabit a world in which the distinction between performer and simulation, artwork and host, author and generated entity becomes increasingly uncertain.
The Gallery is a project about the seduction and failure of images, about the violence hidden inside immaculate surfaces, and about the possibility of using AI against its own dominant tendencies, pushing it away from smooth illusion and toward something stranger, poorer, more symbolic, and more alive.
Shows
Escape Media homepage cover feature
Credits
Concept and art direction - Francesca Fini
THE GALLERY - SIMUL / ACTION # 1
The Game
Two symbolic golfers/performers in an art gallery that dissolves into cosmic abstraction, transforming the athletic gesture into aesthetic sabotage, tracing the genealogy of the image back to the first heartbeat of a hand against a rock.
The Concept: Aesthetic Sabotage
SIMUL / ACTION 1 inaugurates THE GALLERY series by posing a fundamental question: what remains of the flesh when translated into neural flows? Within a gallery suspended in a cosmic void—an impossible architecture that defies the laws of traditional Architecture—two real-life performers lend their movements to a ritual of involuntary action painting.
Playing golf with eggs filled with pigment, the subjects do not seek a score, but an explosion: the color becomes the revealer of the glitch, a synthetic skin highlighting the friction between human intent and machine interpretation. The gallery itself, the ultimate space of preservation, dissolves in the finale, revealing its nature as pure computational data and opening a temporal portal to the Paleolithic. Here, the circle closes: the handprint of a woman on cave rock becomes the archetype of every future pixel—the first gesture of resistance against the void.
THE GALLERY - SIMUL / ACTION # 2
The Four Rules of a Simul / Action
The second chapter of THE GALLERY series is a visual and philosophical inquiry into the genealogy of the image in the era of generative Artificial Intelligence. While the focus of the first episode was the "aesthetic sabotage" of the athletic gesture, in this second iteration, the research shifts toward the dialectic between architectural space and the fragmentation of post-digital identity.
The Concept: Flesh as Glitch
The video explores the inevitability of human error as the sole remaining trace of authenticity. In an environment dominated by a museum-like perspectival rigor, the performer’s body (the "digital twin") does not seek the perfection of simulation; instead, it claims its right to fail. The gesture—falling, crawling, dismantling—becomes an act of resistance against the algorithm’s polished aesthetics. We do not ask the machine to replicate what we cannot do; we force it to look at what we are: a set of unstable reflections, a sum of clumsy movements that "Synthetic Lore" attempts in vain to map completely.
Visually, the work is articulated through the contrast between the solidity of the ancestral past (the Baroque location) and the evanescence of future matter. The mirror suit becomes a fundamental narrative device: no longer just a costume, but a sensitive skin that reflects and fragments the surrounding environment, blurring the boundary between subject and space. The use of purely mechanical and symbolic devices—such as the pink screwdriver or the metronome—introduces elements of the absurd and surrealism that deconstruct the linear narrative, transforming the performance into a metaphysical ritual.
The 3D reconstruction of The Gallery, with Claude, Phyton and Blender
Spatial coherence is one of the central problems in my AI-generated performances. What matters to me is not simply producing a striking image, but constructing an environment that can sustain multiple shots and symbolic actions without collapsing in perspective, proportion, or internal logic.
Although many commercial tools are now addressing this issue, especially through Gaussian splat workflows, I still find the most reliable solution to be more grounded: rebuilding the space in 3D.
Recently, I developed a faster workflow by combining Claude, Python, and Blender. I begin with a single view of an AI-generated space, then generate the remaining views to establish a more complete spatial structure. From these images, my custom Claude-based script produces Python code that reconstructs the architecture directly inside Blender.
What emerges is not a mere visual approximation but a parametric architectural model that can be refined through language: dimensions, proportions, spatial relationships, and structural details can all be adjusted before manual intervention begins. The result is not a perfect replica of the source images but a solid and highly flexible foundation.
From there, I refine the environment manually, texture it, light it, and render it as a coherent space able to support the entire visual sequence. I also position provisional figures within it, later replacing them with final characters developed through image-generation and editing tools while maintaining continuity through reference datasets.
For this particular video test, I worked with the raw geometry of the environment in a deliberately reduced state, with basic lighting and no textures, using Dreamina AI and Seedance 2 for character animation.
