What Happens When the Internet Goes Out?

I sat down with Lou Faroux—French artist and filmmaker—to talk about growing up on The Sims, why she spent years making films before she ever touched a game engine, and what it means to treat internet collapse as an art subject rather than a catastrophe.

Lou's practice is hard to categorize, which is exactly why I find it so interesting. She uses game engines, deepfakes, found footage, and AI avatars to ask something most of us feel but struggle to name: what did the internet do to us? Not what it gave us—what it did to us. To our habits, our bodies, our sense of time.

In this conversation, we get into her origin story as a gamer who hacked The Sims with her sister, why Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian keep showing up in her work as near-religious figures, how she builds with gaming assets the way a painter builds with color, and what she means when she talks about internet collapse as a subject for anthropology rather than science fiction.

This is the public version of a longer members-only conversation. Paid members get the full hour, including a deep dive into her current project —Diamonds and Dust—a virtual world built around queer Hollywood history from the 1930s.

If this conversation makes you want more, the best next step is signing up for the Killscreen newsletter at www.killscreen.com. It's free to start, and it's where I do my most serious writing on games as cultural objects.

Members–here's your full conversation with Lou: