LE BOOK sits with Franki Domino

Known for his surreal digital collages and illustrations, Julien Pacaud has spent years building strange, dreamlike worlds where familiar images are subtly displaced. He has developed a parallel practice under the name Franki Domino, the identity he uses for his AI-generated work. The name itself was born for a surprisingly practical reason.

A CHILDHOOD DREAM

Long before generative AI entered the creative mainstream, he was already fascinated by the idea of an image that had yet to be seen. The thought came to him when he began thinking about digital images as combinations of pixels. If every pixel could theoretically take a finite number of positions, then, somewhere within that almost infinite number of possible combinations, every conceivable image might already exist: a landscape on a distant planet, a place no human has ever seen, a scene that has never existed outside the imagination.

It was less a childhood fantasy than a thought experiment. But it stayed with him. Years later, when generative AI arrived, he recognised something familiar in the technology. Its so-called latent space seemed strangely close to the infinite image library he had imagined: a vast field of possibilities waiting to be searched, uncovered and brought into existence. “I started experimenting with AI four or five years ago,” he explains. “At first, it was only a small part of my traditional collage work.” As the experiments became increasingly independent from his existing practice, he and his agent decided it made sense to separate the two sides of his work: Franki Domino was born. What began as a practical distinction has since become a new territory for discovery and exploration.

That sense of exploration sits at the heart of his practice today.

THE PLEASURE OF NOT KNOWING

The difference between Julien Pacaud and Franki Domino is not really a difference in imagination. Both are drawn to surrealism, mystery and the strange. What changes is the range of possibilities. AI allows the artist to move between drawing, painting, photography and hybrid forms that would have been difficult for him to explore through digital collage alone. It also opens up moving image, an area he feels he has only just begun to investigate.

But greater possibility comes with a new problem: how do you choose?

AI can produce an enormous number of images in a very short amount of time. For him, this makes selection one of the most important  and most demanding parts of the creative process. “I really need to be surprised at the beginning,” he says. Unlike the popular idea of the artist who enters a perfectly constructed prompt and receives a finished image, Domino rarely starts with a precise vision. His personal work begins more like his collages have always begun: with an accident, an unexpected image, an association that leads somewhere else.

One image suggests another. A combination produces something unexpected. A direction emerges slowly. Sometimes it leads nowhere. Sometimes the idea only becomes clear at the very end. “I feel a little like an explorer,” he says. It is perhaps the most revealing description of his process.

FINDING THE IMPERFECT IN A PERFECT MACHINE

There is an irony to his relationship with AI. The technology can produce images that are almost unnervingly polished, yet part of his process is devoted to bringing imperfection back into them. He looks for errors, unpredictability and visual friction not because an image needs to look “wrong”, but because something slightly unresolved can create a feeling that technical perfection cannot.

“Errors don’t bother me if they ultimately make sense within the image,” he says. “I’m not interested in error for its own sake.”

His control therefore exists less in the act of generating than in the act of choosing. This distinction is important. Domino does not consider AI a true collaborator. The machine, he argues, has no inner world, no personal taste and no artistic intention of its own. It responds to direction. It proposes. The human part begins with what happens next. He may generate hundreds of images and keep only a fraction. From that fraction, perhaps only a handful become finished works. The abundance of AI does not remove the artist from the process; it makes the artist’s eye more important.

BEYOND THE PROMPT

For Domino, this is also why the idea that generative art is simply about writing the “right prompt” misses the point. His prompts are often surprisingly short. He is less interested in describing exactly what an image should contain than in finding the right visual language in which something unexpected can emerge. He works extensively with Midjourney, experimenting with combinations of styles: photography with painting, drawing with photorealism, and hybrids that sit somewhere between them. The process can be long and frustrating. But when two, three, four or five visual languages suddenly begin to produce something that moves him, the frustration becomes part of the excitement. A basic prompt, he says, will usually produce a generic image. That is precisely what he is trying to avoid.

AN ARTIST MADE OF IMAGES

His broader practice has always existed somewhere between disciplines. Cinema, music, literature and visual art all feed into the same internal landscape. He describes this accumulation of influences as a kind of magma: “Everything we have seen, heard, loved or disliked collides somewhere inside us, eventually resurfacing in whatever we make.“ For him, those influences do not need to stay within their original medium. A film can influence an image. Music can influence a collage. A painting can find its way into a piece of video. Nothing remains neatly separated.

This is also why his personal work does not necessarily begin with a subject or a message. While commissioned illustration may take him into politics, technology, food or nature, his own work tends to resist an explicit theme. His challenge is often to approach a given subject while keeping it mysterious, slightly displaced, detached from the obvious. He does not feel he has a message that needs to be communicated through every image.

What he has is a world.

WHO OWNS AN IMAGE ?

The question of authorship inevitably follows AI. If an image is generated by a system trained on millions or billions of existing images, where does the artist end and the machine begin? Domino’s answer begins with a challenge to the premise itself.

“Every artist is already working from an enormous internal archive. We absorb images, artists, films, books and visual languages throughout our lives. We remember them, reject them, combine them and transform them. Very little is completely new.”

According to him, what matters is what we do with what we have absorbed. This is where he sees his own authorship. He is not asking AI to reproduce an existing image or perfectly imitate another artist. He is using an enormous visual reservoir to create combinations that correspond to his own inner world. And then he makes the final decision. He invokes Marcel Duchamp almost playfully: “Duchamp did not build the urinal, but he chose it, presented it and transformed its meaning.”

Domino’s point is simple: selection is also authorship. The machine may generate the possibilities. The artist decides which one deserves to exist.

AGAINST THE “EASY” ARGUMENT

Domino is less interested in the polarised conversation surrounding AI. He finds it frustrating that generative tools are so often reduced to accusations of plagiarism or to the idea that using AI somehow removes the human being from the creative process.

He recently came across a post from The Guardian’s visual department inviting “human” illustrators to submit their work. For him, the implication behind that distinction is telling: that work made with a digital tool might somehow be less human, less authentic, or without “soul”. He sees this kind of positioning as overly simplistic  and sometimes more concerned with appearing to stand on the “right” side of a cultural debate than with engaging with its complexity.

THE ART OF ALWAYS LOOKING

Perhaps the most revealing thing he says is that, despite having access to the technology he once imagined, he still does not know exactly what image he is looking for. He is still searching. And that is the point. Technology is evolving so quickly that what seemed impossible a few months ago can suddenly become possible. Rather than trying to predict where his practice will end up, Franki wants to keep following those openings whenever they help him give form to something that exists, for now, somewhere in his unconscious mind.

There is something reassuringly human about that process. Allow the accident. Wait for the image that stops you. The machine may have opened the door to an almost infinite number of images. But it still cannot decide which one matters. That part, for now, belongs to him. And he is still searching.