Artistic Principle
Shot&Prompt is a form of visual creation that begins with a photograph of the
real world and unfolds through a sequence of images generatedby prompts, thus extending Roland Barthes’s
“that-has-been”
into
“that-has-been&imagined”.
The photograph becomes the source image, the incipit of an unfolding visual exploration.
Each new image retains something from the previous one while introducing a variation, a displacement,
or an opening toward other possibilities.
Generative AI is the tool that enables these transformations, while the choices remain human: what to transform,
what to preserve, what to reject, and what meaning to let emerge from the sequence.
The result is a visual morphogenesis in which reality gradually opens up to imagination.
01
Seed image
A real photograph, intentionally presented in its raw form, opens the sequence and anchors it in the real world.
02
Prompt metamorphosis
The prompt acts as an operator of variation, displacement, and continuation.
03
Visual sequence
Successive transformations connect the images to one another,
creating a coherent visual trajectory in which meaning emerges.
From Selfies to Shompties
Today, everyone has a camera on their smartphone, wherever they are and at any moment.
Images have become an everyday form of sharing:
I was here, I saw this, this happened.
The selfie pushes this logic even further by turning the camera toward oneself,
while the world is reduced to a background.
Shot&Prompt begins with a simple idea:
imagination lives within each of us and finds expression in a unique way of seeing,
interpreting, and narrating the world. What is still needed are the tools and a method
to give that vision form.
Shot&Prompt therefore offers the
shomptie as a counterpoint to the selfie.
A shomptie begins with a shot and unfolds through prompts.
Just as the selfie gave everyone a way to step into the picture, the shomptie invites everyone to share their imagination.
By combining the camera everyone already carries, prompting, and generative AI,
the shomptie transforms an encounter with reality into a visual creation.
A new way to photograph. A new why.
Narrative
A shomptie that tells a story. Each prompted image moves the action
forward, introduces a character, transforms a situation, or creates
a turning point.
Poetic
A shomptie in which the photograph becomes poetic material. Reality
drifts toward atmosphere, dream, metaphor, memory, or emotion.
Documentary
A shomptie strongly anchored in a real place. Prompted images
extend the photograph by revealing the historical, social,
hidden, or imagined layers of that place.
Surreal
A shomptie in which the initial photograph gradually drifts toward the
strange, the impossible, or the absurd. Reality remains recognizable,
but becomes unstable.
Critical
A shomptie that, through its successive transformations, questions a situation:
a place, a sign, a rule, an urban trace, a social gesture, or a collective memory.
Offbeat
A shomptie that finds humor in a mismatch, an incongruity,
or an unexpected twist. Reality remains familiar, but the situation
gradually becomes funny, improbable, or mischievous.
An Open Visual Dialogue
Shot&Prompt rests on a visual language
born from the interplay between photographed reality and the successive
transformations generated by prompts. It combines a lexicon of shapes,
colors, patterns, textures, and objects with a grammar that preserves,
shifts, combines, repeats, or metamorphoses them from one image to the next.
Meaning gradually emerges from this evolution. Each shomptie thus follows
a unique trajectory, and anyone can in turn make this language their own
to give rise to new meanings.
Shot&Prompt thus invites everyone to take part
in a visual dialogue: by exploring new trajectories from an existing
shomptie, or by prompting their own source photograph.