Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Cédric Plessiet is a full professor in digital arts at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, where he teaches in the ATI (Arts and Technologies of the Image) department and co-directs the INREV atelier within the AIAC laboratory. His practice sits at the crossroads of computer science, artificial intelligence, and digital art, a resolutely research-creation approach in which technical expertise and artistic invention are inseparable.

Trained as both an engineer and an artist, he has spent over two decades developing tools, algorithms, and interactive systems in direct service of artistic creation: real-time 3D simulation, generative systems, motion capture pipelines, neural networks, and more recently large language models integrated into performative devices. This rare combination of deep technical fluency and artistic sensibility defines his work and his pedagogy alike.

His theoretical contribution, the PGAM model (Puppet, Golem, Actor, Mask), proposes a rigorous classification of virtual entities based on the origin of their movement and decision-making, a framework that has proven particularly prescient in the era of generative AI, which finally makes the long-theorized "virtual actor" a tangible reality.

These questions find their most sustained expression in the Kellynoïde project, a nine-year collaboration with actress Kelly Mézino. Drawing on 3D scanning, machine learning, and custom LLM architectures, the project constructs a "double-other": a digital entity with its own memory, voice, and emerging subjectivity, raising fundamental questions about identity, embodiment, and the ethics of AI-generated presence.