Beyond the Prompt: From Studio Artist to Art Director

During a recent talk on AI and art at Luxembourg Art Week, I was asked two very simple, yet fundamental questions:

How do you integrate AI into your creative process?
And how do you see your role as an artist in all of this?

These questions come up often whenever AI and art are mentioned together. So I decided to turn my answer into a blog post and share a bit more of what happens behind the scenes in my work.

I’m Benoît Theunissen, a multimedia visual artist, and my main medium is photography. Over the last few years, I’ve started to deeply integrate AI into my creative process, not as a shortcut, but as a new set of brushes, actors and collaborators.

Photography is still my anchor point, but around it I’ve been building an ecosystem of digital tools: some generate images, others create music or sound design, others handle motion, video, or even 3D. I combine them the way you might combine lenses, lights, actors and a film crew. Each tool has its own role. My job is to orchestrate that ensemble. as an art director.