Desaulles.Art

CHLOÉ DESAULLES

ARTIST BIO

Chloé Desaulles is a NYC-based, Alsatian-raised computational artist and researcher. Her practice explores the use of emerging technologies as visual and narrative textures in documentary storytelling. Through gathering [custom datasets], tinkering [software] and reassembling [immersively], she creates frameworks where experimental capture, generative archives and analog pattern-making converse. Examining the documentation of memory, natural environments and legacy, Desaulles focuses on deeply personal narratives, tugging at the tensions between tangible and ethereal through multimedia layering in a shared space. With a degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and Electronic Media Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, her work bridges research and narrative, with her time at The New York Times R&D shaping her technological approach and documentary rigor. Her films have screened internationally at The Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Culture Hub's Re-Fest, The Raw Science Film Festival (Academy Award Eligible), and the New York City Independent Film Festival.

CONTACT

cdesaull@gmail.com
Instagram
412.539.6764

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

Interdisciplinary Bachelor in Fine Arts & Neuroscience

With a focus in Electronic & Time Based Media

Exhibitions, Talks & Residencies

Dazed Archive Live,
‘Anti-User Experience: Physical Communication Across Digital Culture’, Chloé Desaulles in conversation with Yehwan Song’
(2025)

Rhizome World,
Artist Talk
(2025)

Video Art & Experimental Film Festival, Honorable Mention
(2025)

Venezia Shorts,
Film Festival, Official Selection
(2025)

Dallas International Film Festival, Gold Winner in the Music Video Category
(2025)

School of Visual Arts,
Artist Talk
(2025)

Culture Hub RE-FEST,
‘i’m so like’ showcased in online group show,
(2024)

HEART Gallery,
‘Sacred Screenshots’
Group Show
(2024)

Columbia University,
Artist Talk
(2024)

NYU ITP,
Artist Talk
(2024)

Barnard College,
Artist Talk
(2023)

New York Independent Film Festival,
Official Selection for ‘Dedications I-V’
(2020)

Raw Science Film Festival (Academy Award Eligible),
Official Selection and Finalist for ‘Dedications I-V’
(2020)

Dumbo Film Festival,
Semi-Finalist for ‘Dedications I-V’
(2020)

The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry,
Residency
(2020)

Miller Institute for Contemporary Art,
‘Bounce’ Group Show
(2019)

Freiburger Kunsthalle,
Group Show
(2015)

Awards & Grants

Dara Birnbaum Award,
for Exceptional Work at the Intersection of Media, Art and Technology
(2019)

Phi Beta Kappa Honoree
(2019)

Frank-Ratchye Fund for Arts at the Frontier
(2018)

Words,
Printed Matter
& Press

One-to-one Time as Evidence for Process, OAS, Essay
(2025)

‘Answered Interruptions’ : The HTML Review, Essay
(2025)

Dazed Archive Live,
Dazed Feature
(2025)

The New York Times,
Citation from my Essay ‘1:1 Time as Evidence for Process’
(2025)

‘1:1 Time as Evidence for Process’: Essay
(2025)

‘Holding My Mother on the Kitchen Floor’ : Byline, Essay
(2024)

‘On Loving Machines’: 032c (print), Essay
(2024)

‘Small Victories’: Photobook
(2020)

‘Great Escapes’: Rachel Wang’s Favorite Short Films, Cited for ‘Dedications I-V’
(2020)

Last Updated 10.05.2025

RELEVANT SELECTED WORKS

Immersive installation mockup, single screen.

Immersive installation mockup, multi screen.The Ash tree always visible on one large screen.

Alsace holds a specific sorrow only a land that has known decades of war can carry. Occupied by German forces longer than it ever stayed French, the region radiates a sense of independence, stubbornness, perseverance and cultural blurriness. There is a hyperspecificity to its language, a denseness to its people, a melancholy to its stories, and a deep green palette to its landscapes.

Living forest elements will be placed in the space, alongside natural light mimicking and virtual screens (this is an inpiration photograph, credit: Ca’n Terra by Ensamble Studio).

Photogrammetric captures of different forests in Alsace-Lorraine.

(img. 1) Alsatian textiles, (img.2) Historic loan documents found in city archives, belonging to my great-grandfather Maurice Desaulles in Mulhouse, France, for his textile factory HKD (Heilmann, Koechlin & Desaulles). This was before his forceful ousting post Nazi-regime.

Granddaughter combing a dog.

Tracing the forest and its landmarks in Google Maps, from a distance in NYC. This story is perfectly suited for a New York audience, a city of transplants, missing our roots and reconstructing them in our minds from afar.

1. Le Plus Haut des Sapins
(Proposal, trans. The Tallest Fir)

In progress, New York City, NY.

Multi-channel, interactive documentary installation exploring grief, memory, and environmental connection through Alsace's textile industry and family heritage.

The installation brings to life a man for whom words never flowed generously, now facing a critical moment: with deteriorated vertebrae, the lifelong walker can no longer walk. Through live action footage, archival video materials and 3D reconstruction of Alsatian landscapes, I archive time, memory, and environment as the body degrades, bringing a spectator along for a walk as I create an intimate document of love between generations, and between a man and his land.

Dedications I-V, three-channel video, installed at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh (2019).

Excerpt from Dedications I-V, showcasing the stylistic loss of frames, and the cogntivie cues meant to illicit a stengthening of neural pathways.

Dedications I-V official poster. The project was selected most notably at The New York Independent Film Festival, and Academy Award eligible Raw Science Film Festival.

2. Dedications I-V (2019)

Time-based media,
three channel projection (23min)
Miller Institute for Contemporary Art,
Pittsburgh, PA

Dedications I-V is a short film composed of individual tales on memory as told by people with progressive memory loss. The short is based on neuroscience research (Andrews-Salvia, Roy & Cameron, 2003), suggesting that memories can be made more resistant to degenerative disorders through the use of active recall.

Through this method, the film is meant to act as a visual document of the protagonists’ memories, as well as a tool to strengthen them. This short was made using depth data with depthkit, the kinectv2 and unity, taking advantage of the medium’s loss of frames and visual inaccuracy to contribute to an already fading narrative. Original score by Alexander Panos.

Natural Patterns and Datasets in Spaces (2024) installed, NYC, NY.

‘Windows (video 4)’(2024) recreating the ephemeral moment a ray of light hits a single window.

Dataset creation and collection process over the course of 1 year and 600 photographs.

3. Natural Patterns and Datasets in Spaces (2024)

Video series, five works.

Natural Patterns and Datasets in Spaces (2024) is a generative video series that combines machine learning techniques with a carefully hand-crafted dataset. This artwork explores the distinctive physical properties, texture and visual capabilities of AI, by integrating analog processes of art-making in its makeup. Through the slow collection of ephemeral circumstances the artist focuses on capturing fleeting moments in time, and recreating them ad infinitum.

In ‘Windows’ (2024) (video 4) the artist specifically collects the instant in which sunlight illuminates a single window in the New York City architectural landscape at sunset. Over a year, Desaulles gathered over 600 photographs, each depicting a different window and light pattern, to create a comprehensive personal dataset. This archive of ephemeral moments forms the basis for generating infinite new instances of them, each highlighting the micro scale of a single window. Through their juxtaposition, the piece draws attention to the immensity of the 8 million lives living behind these windows, using a series of unique moments captured in light and color.

4. i’m so like: A generative gossip machine(2024)

Time-based media, Generative video made from scraped GRWM (Get Ready With Me) tiktoks.

This piece is one instance of a generative exquisite corpse, a game of whispers, in which I deconstruct the structure of gossip borrowed from dozens of scraped GRWM tiktok videos and generatively re-arrange them by sentence type such as ‘intro’, ‘commentary’, ‘bridge’, ‘conclusion’ to create infinite new gossip.

5. Hangover - Charlotte Rose Benjamin (Official Music Video, 2025)

Music video, directed, shot, edited and animated by Chloé Desaulles.

The work was shot and edited using a multitude of experimental filmmaking techniques, both 3D and live action, which were assembled and layered digitally.

Utilizing innovations in photogrammetry technology and gaussian splatting, Charlotte Rose Benjamin's sets were assembled both physically through environmental cutouts and material furniture elements, as well as digitally through 3D modeling, custom machine learning, and painted in-software.

As the artist navigates these threshold spaces, she embodies the cyclical nature of grief: memory dissolving into reality, heartbreak transforming into release. The work, playing with the individual textures of physical and analog media, captures Benjamin caught in an eternal seasonal and environmental cycle—a pendulum swinging between physical reality and digital ethereality, until she is eventually graced with her own release.

Color by Julius Gutierrez
Furniture by Katy Brett
Graphic Design by Faith Kim
Wardrobe by Chloe Felopulos
Lighting Consultancy by Jacob Wesson Production Assistance by Brian Park

6. The New York Times, Generative 3D Scenes for the World Cup (2022)

The New York Times published a series of articles for the World Cup, in which we used experimental 3D imaging with machine learning to study specific goal positions. Above are stills from 3D captures from those articles.

6. New York Times Immersive (2021-2023)

Documentation of some immersive work executed while at The New York Times R&D on immersive documentary work, and how the extensive New York Times archives can be adapted to a mixed reality information landscape.

Thank you for your consideration!