Pacific Palisades
A digital art project by Louis-Paul Caron

This project grew out of a reflection on memory, disappearance, and the reconstruction of landscapes transformed by climate change. Developed in Los Angeles during a residency with Villa Albertine, it explores the meeting point between painting and generative art as tools for immersive storytelling.

The installation seeks to convey a landscape in transition, caught between disappearance and persistence, memory and reconstruction. It proposes a living image, in which technology becomes a tool for emotion and collective reflection.

The project takes as its starting point a series of oil paintings depicting houses in Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood severely affected by the January 2025 wildfires. Based on archival images and on-site research, these paintings become the raw material for a generative AI animation process, transforming the fixed image into a visual matter in constant evolution, a custom-trained LoRA model learns the paintings' visual language and reconstructs an infinite range of houses, echoing the way memory itself works.

For projection, these animations are conceived specifically for architectural mapping. The facade is not treated as a simple screen, but as an active structure: its windows, rhythms, and volumes become part of the composition, guiding the evolution of the animation as though the image were fusing with the architecture itself.

A soundtrack composed of field recordings gathered on-site from dawn to dusk, capturing birds, wind, and the quiet sounds of a landscape in recovery, accompanies and extends these visual transformations, deepening the immersive experience and evoking states of loss, memory, and regeneration.