Cowpokes riding through the ghost town of an abandoned Western. Isolated cabin, solitary frames, staring out onto the flickering plains of a mythology fading to red. A crossroads. Two mediums, revolvers drawn, caught in a deadly standoff.
Playable Cinema is a research project exploring how artificial intelligence can ride the invisible frontier between cinema history and interactive gameplay. By using machine learning to analyze classical western cinema, the project constructs a generative database where fragments of film history and the streams of live gameplay bleed into one another; where the joystick becomes an editing tool for an infinite fever dream looping through the ghosts of cinematic history.
The project explores how hybrid strategies can emerge new curatorial methodologies as generative tools collaborate with humans in assembling the haunted archive of our shared hallucinations of the West.
- Douglas Edric Stanley, Project Lead, concept, design, development, production, documentation
- Faust Perillaud, Research Assistant, training & labelling, production, documentation, photography
- Guillaume Stagnaro, Cowpoke Controller development
- Colin Castellano, Wood construction consulting & production
- Anthony Masure, Dean of Research, IRAD, HEAD – Genève, HES-SO
- Christelle Granite-Noble, Administrative Coordination, IRAD, HEAD – Genève, HES-SO
- With assistance from: Valentin Dubois, HEAD – Genève, Head of Materials + Prototyping Pool, Alexandre Simian, Technician Wood Workshop, HEAD – Genève, Sébastien Pitteloud, Technician Wood Workshop, HEAD – Genève, Charles Cuccu, Régisseur HEAD – Genève
- Full process documentation + source code: github.com/abstractmachine/head-irad-playable-cinema
- Presentation: From Mimesis To Machine, Istituto Svizzero, 2025-11-27
Installation
Dead Crossing is the latest physical manifestation of the Playable Cinema research project. Inside of an unfinished wooden cabin, visitors explore the video game world of Red Dead Redemption 2. As they move through its three-dimensional virtual terrain, AI models synchronize their movements with shots echoing from the history of Western cinema.
Controller
A physical game controller is currently in developement. This allows visitors to interact with the installation.
Software
A training and playback tool is currently in development. This software syncs in real-time the gameplay coming out of the gaming console, and finds appropriate images from the massive database of western cinema imagery.
Demo
You can watch a short excerpt of the software analysing in real-time the gameplay, and synchronising these images with associated shots from historical western cinema.
Here is a scene tested live with gameplay of a train robbery:
And another sequence in the game where the player sneaks into a barn: