is a real-time media artist working with game engines and space on the edge of reality, trust and faith.
is a real-time media artist working with game engines and space on the edge of reality, trust and faith.
Aggregate (2024)
Video game, 3D printed resin, computer, video projection, speakers
Aggregate is a collective process requiring a large number of players to take turns and experience reinforcement learning (punishment/reward) as they progress through the uncharted territory of machine learning and queer desire.
Vincent Moulinet: Game design, Writing, Environment art, 3D modeling, Production
Jonathan Coryn: Game design, Gameplay programming, 3D modeling
Nino Filiu: Gameplay programming, 3D modeling, Animation
Camille Petit: Technical art, Environment art 3D modeling, Animation
Pierre Moulin: Alternative controler, 3D printing
Alpha Rats: UI design
Victor Meas: Character design, 3D modeling
Igor Dubreucq: OST, Sound design, 3D modeling
Moshe Linke: 3D modeling
GENESIS
Working with the dynamics of pre-enactment/re-enactment as a driver for constructing the "world after," we designed Aggregate based on the 8th chapter (published in Habitante issue #1) of Casciani's novel manuscript Maquette, which explores the scale between rurality and virtuality. In it, Damon, a data center employee dressed as a furry, embarks on a wandering journey along the deserted paths of natural cruising spots, an element the novel itself does not delve into.
This collaborative relationship was then stated with curator Julia Marchand in her Everythingism podcast on Projets Media at Villa Medici.
In both architecture and urban planning, we speak of "desire lines," the very paths carved by the comings and goings of cruisers in their playgrounds. Aggregate was built through the aggregation of perspectives, stories, and practices to form the bedrock of a new Parisian scene.
The exhibition space merges with the game space, making the digital process tangible and questioning our sensory relationship with a form of intelligence beyond the human.
What does it feel when it strives to feel?
THIRD LANDSCAPE, QUEER DESIRE & MACHINE LEARNING
In parallel, in machine learning, systems are left "free" to explore patterns and discover relationships between data without explicit intervention. Models emerge autonomously from data, often unpredictably.
Vincent Moulinet hypothesizes that the desire of an individual, human or non-human, might be constructed similarly empirically when left free to interact with a certain reference framework. In Aggregate, this framework, or dataset, is situated, and draws from dozens of conversations held with cruisers during the act on rural locations.
Like the pokeweed, cruisers are seen as an invasive species with no place in spaces society has nonetheless abandoned: industrial infrastructure, clear-cut zones along power lines, riverbanks, state forests. Yet, in these places marked by mundane neglect, both thrive, mutually shaping a territory and an unconventional future. Lacking trust in anarchic order, institutions attempt to sanitize: they clear, detain, and standardize, avoiding any profound understanding of complex states.
The overpowering influence of familialism and the hetero-patriarchy infiltrates the "unoccupied" third landscape to construct a recreation area, a new residential neighborhood, a shopping center. It adjusts the dataset to its own standards, erasing situated realities incompatible with a narrow moral framework, upheld by the oppressor’s tools. Aggregate calls for a radical reconsideration of the aesthetics of abandonment, the contingency of desire, and the subjectivity of algorithms as lenses to observe the contemporary entanglement of the living, the social, and the mechanic.
DESIRE PATHS & GAME MECHANICS ON CRUISING AREAS
Rural cruising spots are often recognizable by an abundance of these dirt paths, compacted by repeated foot traffic, though they seem not to connect any two obvious points of interest. Instead, they form a chaotic web, weaving around trees to rejoin the main trail, or veering into another bush for no apparent reason. This tangled network is explained by the shifting nature of desired points: cruisers are both active participants and mobile targets within the hunter/hunted dynamic intrinsic to their practices. As a fleeting queer archive, this network evolves with the seasons. The earth softens in winter when the paths go unused, and the trails disappear under brambles in spring, until the return of warm weather brings the first cruisers, carving paths through tall grass.
Driven by desire for moving targets or the need to blend into the landscape, these pathfinders take on a sacrificial role, at least through the romantic's eye: thorns and branches scratch the skin, nettles release their silica into calves, snakes take offense, and new branches block the way. While this role carries many disadvantages, it leaves the imprint of a strategy to conquer the third landscape, avoiding other cruisers or unsuspecting passersby in the pursuit of a hidden place.
Throughout the season, new paths form depending on the context, leading to organic structures made of branches, ivy, and brambles that, having accepted the wanderers' presence, provide the secluded cocoons they need. There’s a nearly symbiotic relationship between the cruisers and the elements of these places: one eventually shields the other, while the latter repels destructive hetero-patriarchal intrusions by the notoriety their activities generate.
Aggregate draws on these dynamics to create an analogy between the punitive nature of reinforcement learning and these pleasure sites, which can also be hostile, viewed as "punishment spaces," in the words of sociologist Lucas Fritz. As players progress in the game, they generate a chaotic mesh of desire lines, scraping against the environment and the thorny game controller, collapsing, starting over, or stepping aside for others who will benefit from their efforts to explore new areas and perhaps, finally, encounter the long-sought entity floating above its cybernetic fortress: a brutalist, windowless data center looming in the sky.
WORLDBUILDING & ARCHITECTURES OF THE ENCOUNTER
Starting from a rest area, a classic cruising site welcoming anonymous travelers from the relentless highway, the AI sets its gaze on a monumental, windowless building (designed by Jonathan Coryn), crowned by an abstract, luminous entity. A nod to the video game trope of a fortress to conquer, this data center, powered by a network of high-voltage lines, contrasts physical spaces of encounter with their cybernetic counterparts, framed in aggressive neo-brutalist lines. At its heart levitates Damon, a character from Théo Casciani's novel, whom the AI ultimately seeks to meet.
Further east, an eerie church clings to a mountainside (by Victor Méas). A halted movement penetrates the concrete walls, a collision has occurred. The misty atmosphere reveals the molten remnants of what were once two bodies, now frozen in the potent potential of a powerful spread.
Exiting, one sees an arrow pointing skyward, with four concentric staircases suspended upon it (created by Nino Filiu). A negative hall of mirrors, offering exits at every turn through sometimes risky jumps, it ultimately leads the AI to meet itself and experience desire for its own being.
In a deserted plaza stands a sculpture of three interlocking rings. Behind it rises an office building (designed by Moshe Linke), a labyrinth that intertwines the complexities of intimacy with a long, laborious journey. Complex, imperfect, and challenging to traverse, this structure was instinctively improvised, with only sheer chance guiding one to its summit.
Lost in dense fog, a scorched GIFI store (by Vincent Moulinet) seems frozen in time. Likely set ablaze by communities that resisted its attempt to appropriate their social space for its own agenda, its hostile form has transformed back into an ideal playground. Among the ruins lies a stretched, vascularized skin, alive but other, with no fixed identity of its own.
À QUOI JOUAIT ASHA?
For issue #7 of MAGMAH, the magazine of the Museum of Art and History of Geneva, Vincent Moulinet contributes an experimental essay on video games and machine learning seen through the lens of operatory images.
The text explores how artificial intelligence and its visual culture infiltrate artistic and gaming environments, tracing the feedback loops between simulation, automation, and desire. From scientific renderings to gameplay interfaces, he examines how machines learn to see and act, and how humans, in turn, learn to play like machines.
Mixing theory, fiction, and personal reflection, the essay unfolds as a speculative walkthrough where algorithms become avatars and images behave like agents. Between the laboratory and the game world, À quoi jouait Asha ? questions the aesthetics of training, the erotics of efficiency, and the poetic potential of malfunction.
It closes with a reflection on his own practice, sinking into the world of Aggregate, where the logic of machine learning becomes a framework to think about perception, attention, and the emotional charge of interaction, a way to approach gameplay as a space for learning rather than mastery.
Access the publication
Exhibitions
2025_ Grand Palais (Paris, FR), “Fun Palace” - curated by Emmanuelle Coccia2025_ After Hours gallery (Paris, FR), “Aggregate” - curated by Samuel Belfond
2025_ A MAZE. (Berlin, DE), “Official selection” - curated by Thorsten S. Wiedemann
2025_ CPH:DOX (Copenhagen, DK), “Inter:Active” - curated by Mark Atkins
2024_ Octobre Numérique (Arles, FR), “Désolé.es” - curated by Vincent Moncho
2024_ TLN Hybrid festival (Toulon, FR), “Me & Who ?” - curated by Cami Chochinbi
Press
Projets Media, Julia Marchand, 2025 “Everythingism: Théo Casciani & Vincent Moulinet”Mouvement, Orianne Hidalgo-Laurier, 2024, “Faire Monde quand tout est K.O.”
Usbek & Rica, Sophie Kloetzli, 2024, “Permacomputing”