Made by AI, Directed by David Stein

Search
Digital Artists

POLYGON1993 Runs Everything Through Circuit-Bent Video Gear and a CRT, Including the AI

A French glitch artist whose signal chain ends in 1990s hardware — and whose Sora experiments still get dragged through the same machines before he'll sign them.

3 min read

Most artists working with “analogue warmth” are applying it at the end, in software, as a look. POLYGON1993 does it the other way round: the damage is the instrument, and it happens in hardware, in real time, before anything is a file.

He is a French visual artist, film director and media scenographer who started in 2015 after finding glitch art on Tumblr, then learned circuit bending — physically modifying electronics to make them misbehave — in order to build a glitch machine out of a video synthesiser. The signal chain runs through circuit-bent video gear from the 1980s and ’90s and out to a CRT television, and the distorted, torn scanlines that result assemble into portraits.

His client list is not what you’d predict from that description: A$AP Rocky, Grimes, Tame Impala, Charli XCX, Pantone, Sony Music, Warner Music. He has exhibited in the USA, Japan, France, the UK, Portugal, Italy and South Korea.

Koi No Yokan

His first solo exhibition in France — Koi No Yokan (“The Premonition of Love”) — ran at Artverse, Paris, from July through September 2026.

Fifteen physical works: ten UV prints, four UV textured paintings, and one UV print on plexiglass sculpture. There was a dedicated section for Phantasm, his original trading card game, and a collaboration with Mitsuhiro Arita — the illustrator behind some of the original Pokémon Trading Card Game’s most recognisable artwork — titled Kirin, a sumi-ink work that POLYGON1993 then glitched.

The Japanese-title-French-artist combination is the practice in miniature. His stated material is nostalgia for an obsolete analogue world, filtered through Japanese aesthetics and French sensibility, and Koi No Yokan is a Japanese phrase with no clean English equivalent — the sense on meeting someone that love is inevitable later.

The video above isn’t POLYGON1993’s own, but it demonstrates the technique his work is built on — circuit-bent video hardware shot off a CRT — for anyone who has only seen the results.

What he does with generative video

POLYGON1993 has worked with Sora, and the way he describes it is more useful than most artist statements about AI, because he is specific about where it sits in a chain that was already fully formed.

He uses it as a source, not an output. Generated animations go into his edit, and then that montage goes through the glitch synthesisers and the CRT to get the VHS look. The AI material never leaves the pipeline untouched.

The two things he says it changed:

  • Perfect loops. He works mostly with human models, and a seamless loop in traditional video always requires tricks that produce something merely acceptable. Generated material loops exactly.
  • Animating the back catalogue. He can now build an animation from one of his own older still works — something he says he simply couldn’t do at the time.

That’s a narrow, honest account of a tool’s value, and it’s notable for what it doesn’t claim. The aesthetic decisions still happen in the hardware. The generative model produces raw footage that then gets deliberately destroyed by machines from thirty years earlier, which is either a very funny sentence or a reasonable description of where a lot of practice is heading.

Related Reading